Vann R. Newkirk II | The Atlantic

How America Got So Sick

2026-02-09T07:00:00-05:00

Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on February 18, 2026

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In the winter of 168 C.E., the famed Greek physician Galen arrived in Aquileia, an Italian city on the northern edge of the Adriatic. The city had grown large since its founding as a Roman colony, but during the 200-year Pax Romana, its fortifications had been allowed to deteriorate. After an armed group of migrating Germanic peoples had crossed the Danube a year earlier, the Roman co-emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, had rushed to the city, raising two legions and rebuilding its defenses; they planned to use it as a base of operations against the invaders.

Galen had been summoned, however, to help fight a different kind of invader. A plague, likely an early variant of smallpox, had traveled to Aquileia with the troops, and held the city in its grip. The emperors fled, but Verus succumbed to the disease on the road to Rome. Galen tried to slow the wave of illness, but most of the people in Aquileia perished.

They represented just a sliver of the eventual victims of the Antonine Plague, also known as Galen’s Plague, which killed at least 1 million people throughout the Roman empire. It was possibly the world’s first true pandemic, and haunted the empire for the rest of the Pax Romana, which ended in 180 with Aurelius’s death. The details of the pandemic—the exact pathogen, the true number of victims—are subjects of debate, and might never be fully settled. But some research has cited the Antonine Plague as part of a vicious cycle that hastened Rome’s long fall. Food shortages, internal migrations, and overcrowding had already signaled a slippage in imperial power, and created a fertile environment for disease. The pandemic, in turn, spread panic and left behind mistrust, weakening faith in civic and religious authorities.

Men famously think about Rome every day, and political commentators have been nervously comparing Rome’s fall to a potential American collapse since before America even had a Constitution. But Rome’s example really does merit consideration in light of recent events. One of the better measures of a society’s vitality is its ability to protect its citizens from disease, and the two often move in tandem; a decline in one may produce a reduction in the other.

Infectious disease is probably not an imminent threat to the United States’ survival. Still, after nearly a century of existence, the American public-health apparatus, which has driven some of the most remarkable advances in global longevity and quality of life in human history, is teetering. The country has lost much of its ability to keep microbes from invading its body politic, and progress in life expectancy and other metrics is slowing or even reversing.

It is tempting to lay these changes all at the feet of President Trump and his current health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who together have shredded America’s global-health organizations, drawn back public-health funding, fomented vaccine skepticism, and begun to dismantle child-vaccination programs. But the “Make America Healthy Again” moment is in some ways just another step in the long retreat of the civic trust and communitarian spirit that have enabled America’s disease-fighting efforts. If this retreat continues, the public-health era—the century-long period of unprecedented epidemiological safety that has been the foundation for so many other breakthroughs—will come to an end. And that end will have dire consequences for this republic and its future.

In January 2025, a hospital in West Texas began reporting that children were coming in sick with measles. The cases were initially clustered in a Mennonite community, where vaccination rates had been low in recent decades. But soon the outbreak spread around the state, and to others; the reported number of cases reached more than 1,800 by the year’s end. As of this writing, the outbreak is still ongoing, and America is in danger of having its measles-elimination status revoked by the World Health Organization.

On August 8, as the measles outbreak continued to make headlines, a man named Patrick Joseph White entered a CVS in northeast Atlanta and fired hundreds of rounds from a rifle into the CDC’s headquarters across the street. According to Georgia investigators, White had been suicidal, and believed that COVID‑19 vaccines were part of a conspiracy to sicken him and other Americans.

These were but two signs among many that something has broken within the systems that protect the population’s health. Despite all of our advantages, the coronavirus pandemic caused more confirmed deaths per capita in the United States than in any other Western country, and our mortality rate’s recovery has lagged behind others’. Life expectancy in the U.S. is lower than in other high-income nations, and the gulf is widening.

America is unique, and comparisons are difficult. The country easily outpaces the rest of the developed world in gun deaths and overdoses, both major mortality drivers here that have largely been accepted as the cost of being American. But even if you discount those peculiarities, plenty of other indicators are pointing the wrong way. Foodborne illnesses appear to be on the rise, including regular surges of norovirus. Deteriorating water-delivery and sewage systems have contributed to a growing number of outbreaks of legionella. Cases of tetanus, whooping cough, and hepatitis A have also risen in recent years.

Many problems contribute to these shifts—insufficient investments in infrastructure, budget cuts in state and local health departments, the growing drug resistance of bacteria. Yet underlying all of the outbreaks, and even gun and opioid deaths, is a common theme: a declining sense of mutual responsibility among Americans. If the population could be analogized to a single human body, then its immune system would rely on a concert of action and purpose between each cell. When that concert stops, the body dies.

In 1946, the year the U.S. Public Health Service founded its Communicable Disease Center, American life expectancy at birth was about 66 years. Malaria was rampant in the South, and fever diseases, tuberculosis, syphilis, and polio killed tens of thousands of Americans annually. Thirty-four out of every 1,000 children born in 1946 were expected to die before their first birthday, many from communicable diseases. America was moving toward modernity, but the risks people faced were of a different order than they are today.

The CDC (since renamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) inherited much of its early mandate from a U.S. military campaign to control infectious diseases among soldiers fighting in World War II. The scale of the war effort had necessitated the creation of a health infrastructure on American soil—spraying for mosquitoes near the front lines in the Pacific wouldn’t mean anything if soldiers caught malaria at home before deployment. Responses to outbreaks near bases needed to be big and fast enough to account for car travel beyond military jurisdictions. When the CDC took over, it extended this paradigm—of coordination across long distances and disparate communities—to the civilian population.

[From the June 2020 issue: Vann R. Newkirk II on how America handles catastrophe]

The same year the CDC was created, the influenza vaccine reached the public, and international organizations, supported by the U.S., began a global push to eliminate tuberculosis. The agency worked to promote mass vaccination. It began a national disease-surveillance program, and shared intelligence with cash-strapped county health departments and state agencies. Wartime campaigns to coax and chide Americans into doing their part to conserve resources and volunteer for the war effort translated easily into pushes for vaccination and sanitation.

Before 1946, conquering disease would have seemed as much a subject of science fiction as putting a man on the moon. But since 1950, global life expectancy has risen by four years each decade. Smallpox has been eradicated, and polio and malaria cases have dramatically fallen. Within the past 80 years, there have perhaps been more significant advances in human health than there were in the previous 300,000.

On the home front, several generations have grown up on an American mainland without malaria, yellow fever, or typhoid fever; diseases like dysentery are medical rarities. Measles and polio, once routine scourges of childhood, were pushed back by millions of vaccinations. Life expectancy increased by more than a decade, to 78 in 2023. This was a public-health revolution, on equal footing with any of the great agricultural, industrial, or information revolutions that have punctuated the past few centuries.

Those other great revolutions are often considered to be the result of technological advances—the plow, steam power, fertilizers, the internet. And certainly, the development of vaccines, antibiotics, and other medicines has played a tremendous role in the advance of human health. But vaccines for smallpox and some other diseases had been around for at least half a century before the 1940s, and had failed to create widespread immunity. The real public-health revolution was first and foremost a change in the way people thought about themselves and their relationship to one another.

Epidemiology made a new kind of thinking necessary. Pathogens respect neither individuals nor borders. Vaccinations and other preventatives against ever-evolving germs do not on their own guarantee personal safety—only eradication can do that. And eradication, it came to be understood, can be achieved only through local and global cooperation.

In America, where capitalist and individualist ethics have always predominated, public health nonetheless managed to carve out a large cooperative space. Before the 1940s, the United States was still reporting a relatively high number of smallpox cases compared with other similarly industrialized nations; it achieved total elimination in 1949. With the insistence of a growing public-health apparatus, it became common practice to wash our hands, to cover our mouths, to not smoke indoors, and to get tested—not just for our own benefit, but for the sake of the people around us. Parents waited in long lines to have their children inoculated, and enterprising physicians went to rural clinics to reach the last isolated clusters of unvaccinated people.

That is not to say America’s particular system of public health was ever perfect. Owing partly to the legacy of segregation, the country never developed a universal health-insurance program, and maintains a fragmented health-care system in which both class and race still dictate much of a patient’s access to care. Many people on the margins who have wanted to get screened for certain diseases or vaccinated against them have not been able to do so, because they cannot afford to or because no doctor will serve them.

And yet, sometimes through the insistence of those same people that America live up to the tenets of public health, the system has come closer to the ideal. As much as any other institution—schools, libraries, churches—the public-health system has helped propagate the idea of a commons, often working against historical inertia to curb the excesses of American individualism. That work has always required energy and effort from the people. And so it has always been vulnerable, because that energy and effort could dissipate at any time.

There is ample evidence that this is exactly what is happening. According to the health-policy organization KFF, in the summer of 2025 just 83 percent of parents kept their children up to date on vaccines, down from 90 percent four years earlier. Cases are surging for several of the diseases covered by the national vaccine schedule. Measles cases have trended upward for years, even before 2025, and meningococcal disease is rising as well.

Over the past 50 years, American trust in the medical system has declined, as has trust in government, science, and expertise in general. The coronavirus pandemic exploded those trends, creating the world in which we now find ourselves. Public-health agencies did themselves no favors: They often gave out confusing and sometimes conflicting advice. Conspiracy theories grew quickly on social media, and measures such as masking became subject to partisan polarization. According to Gallup, a bare majority—just 51 percent—of Americans now favors government requirements for vaccines, down from 81 percent in 1991 and 62 percent in 2019. Most of the slippage has been among conservatives, and studies suggest that political ideology is perhaps the biggest predictor of vaccine rejection.

Medicine has kept moving forward, with some truly great results. Deaths in the U.S. from cardiovascular disease are plummeting, and might see further declines with the advance of GLP‑1 drugs. With the advent of better cancer-screening tools, survival rates are improving, and wonder-drug therapeutics for many conditions are now on the market. But personalized care of this sort is expensive, and does not keep us collectively safe from infectious disease.

Meanwhile, as viruses that once killed hundreds of thousands have receded from public memory, they have come to seem less fearsome. Owing to the near-eradication of some diseases, there have been few real risks to the heretofore small portion of people who refuse vaccines. In this landscape, organizations such as the CDC, which once stood as unimpeachable examples of government competence, have become victims of their own success, appearing to skeptics to be inert or irrelevant.

This was the system as Trump and Kennedy found it last year, vulnerable and stripped of the halo of public trust. Kennedy slashed agency budgets and stocked a key vaccine advisory committee with vaccine skeptics, then this past January announced a new set of childhood-vaccine recommendations that excluded coverage for rotavirus, influenza, and hepatitis A, which all now cannot be administered to most patients without a doctor’s consultation.

Kennedy’s biggest threat to public health comes from what he symbolizes. The MAHA movement derides expertise, overemphasizes personal commitment and liberty, and has embraced pseudoscience. This stance, mingled with Trump world’s conspiratorial tendencies, has turned the CDC and other once-trusted institutions into targets. After the August shooting at CDC headquarters, hundreds of current and former Health and Human Services employees singled out Kennedy as a driver of the kind of rhetoric that had motivated Patrick Joseph White, referring to the secretary’s previous insinuations that the CDC itself was hiding information about the risks of COVID vaccines.

Marcus Aurelius, the surviving Roman emperor, is mostly famous in our time because of his Stoicism. His philosophy encouraged the embrace of duty, not because of the expectation of praise or other material benefits but because duty is in itself fulfillment of the human condition. In his Meditations, he offered a maxim: “Do your duty—whether shivering or warm, never mind; heavy-eyed, or with your fill of sleep; in evil report or in good report; dying or with other work in hand.”

It’s hard to psychoanalyze a guy who lived two millennia ago, but it’s easy to believe that this particular admonishment may have come from his time as a plague fighter. In the face of Galen’s “everlasting pestilence,” Marcus had to rally the public and improvise, stocking depleted armies with convicts and ordering the digging of mass graves. He saw that the state was held up not just by the military or territory, but by invisible webs of shared sacrifice and obligation. In the end, the fortifications that mattered most were those that strengthened Rome against the invaders that could not be seen.

If the American state disintegrates, future postmortems are unlikely to focus much on measles, or on rotavirus vaccination rates. But the ability to beat back our more routine pathological menaces is a good indicator of the country’s ability to take on bigger, more virulent threats. The thing about bacteria and viruses, our most ancient foes, is that they are always at the gates, waiting for lean times. Among them will be pathogens worse than the coronavirus.

In the main, the withering of public health might not anticipate a future apocalypse so much as it recalls a previous America, one where lives were cheaper and shorter, where good health was the province of a privileged few, and where epidemics regularly scoured the countryside and the city slums. What’s spurring the slide now isn’t a dearth of information or cutting-edge medicine. Rather, the precepts of a shared reality have been shattered, and with them the ability to act for a common cause.

This article originally implied that tuberculosis was among the diseases covered by the national vaccine schedule for which cases are surging. In fact, the United States does not routinely vaccinate for tuberculosis. This article appears in the March 2026 print edition with the headline “How America Got So Sick.”

What Climate Change Will Do to America by Mid-Century

2025-11-10T06:00:00-05:00

Earlier this year, in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, a graveyard was spared by the fire that sent thousands of Los Angeles residents fleeing into the coal-black night. Here, in Mountain View Cemetery, lie the bones of Octavia Butler, the famed science-fiction writer who spent her life in Pasadena and Altadena, both of which had burned. Trinkets offered by fans often decorate Butler’s unassuming grave. A footstone is inscribed with a quotation from her Parable of the Sower : ALL THAT YOU TOUCH, YOU CHANGE. ALL THAT YOU CHANGE, CHANGES YOU.

In that dystopian novel, published in 1993 and set in the mid-2020s, the United States still exists but has been warped by global warming, and its authoritarian government has ceded most of the administration of day-to-day matters to corrupt companies. In Butler’s neo-feudal vision, states and cities erect strict borders to deter migrants, the gap between rich and poor has widened, and massive wildfires in Southern California drive the state’s decline.

It has become commonplace to label Butler a prophet. She didn’t get everything right about the United States today. But even in the things that haven’t happened, exactly, one can see analogs to real life.

Butler, however, considered herself merely an analyst—a “histofuturist.” She often said that her primary skill was simply learning from the past. In her research for Parable, she studied times of rising political strife and demagoguery, along with America’s history of class and racial inequality. She studied what was at the time an emerging scientific consensus regarding global warming, a body of research that even then predicted fires and floods, and warned of political instability.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” Butler wrote in an essay for Essence in 2000. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.” That same year, she said in an interview that she dearly hoped she was not prophesying anything at all; that among other social ills, climate change would become a disaster only if it was allowed to fester. “I hope, of course, that we will be smarter than that,” Butler said six years before her death, in 2006.

What will our “full-fledged disasters” be in three decades, as the planet continues to warm? The year 2024 was the hottest on record. Yet 2025 has been perhaps the single most devastating year in the fight for a livable planet. An authoritarian American president has pressed what can only be described as a policy of climate-change acceleration—destroying commitments to clean energy and pushing for more oil production. It doesn’t require an oracle to see where this trajectory might lead.

[From the July/August 2024 issue: George Packer on how Phoenix is a vision of America’s future]

Taking our cue from Butler, we would do well today to study the ways that climate change has already reshaped the American landscape, and how disasters are hollowing out neighborhoods like the one where Butler is buried. We should understand how catastrophe works in a landscape of inequality.

Over the next 30 years or so, the changes to American life might be short of apocalyptic. But miles of heartbreak lie between here and the apocalypse, and the future toward which we are heading will mean heartbreak for millions. Many people will go in search of new homes in cooler, more predictable places. Those travelers will leave behind growing portions of America where services and comforts will be in short supply—let’s call them “dead zones.” Should the demolition of America’s rule of law continue, authoritarianism and climate change will reinforce each other, a vicious spiral from which it will be difficult to exit.

How do we know this? As ever, all it takes is looking around.

In August, as the setting sun sent a red glow up the San Gabriel Valley, I surveyed a stretch of western Altadena, just blocks from Butler’s grave. The better part of a year had passed since the Eaton Fire—which destroyed some 9,400 buildings here and in Pasadena while the Palisades Fire raged simultaneously to the west. Still, the moonscape in front of me was unsettling. Much of the debris had been cleared, which made the houseless lots seem even more eerie. Here and there, a brick fireplace stood watch over an otherwise empty lot.

In January, when the Santa Ana winds came, Altadenans weren’t too worried. In this part of California, small fires were just part of life. “We always think it’s going to be an earthquake that takes us out,” Veronica Jones, the president of the Altadena Historical Society and a resident for six decades, told me. For many Altadena lifers, the memory of the 1993 Kinneloa Fire, which destroyed almost 200 buildings and burned for five days, was the guide for what to expect in the worst case.

But 1993 was billions and billions of tons of carbon pollution ago. This time around, the physics of the planet were different. In 2023, high temperatures in the Pacific had helped incubate Hurricane Hilary, which led to the first-ever tropical-storm warning in Southern California. The storm dumped buckets of rain on the region, helping spur rapid plant growth over the next several months. But then the rain dried up completely. In the second half of 2024, Los Angeles County received only 0.3 inches of precipitation—the lowest amount on record. The drought and near-record temperatures dried out the lush scrub, turning it to kindling. In just 16 months, multiple supposedly once-a-century weather events had worked in concert to make the hills perhaps more combustible than they’d ever been.

When the winds blew in, bringing dry, warm air from inland over Southern California, they were unusually strong, approaching hurricane strength. Strong winds can damage power lines, and evidence now suggests that a malfunctioning power line helped spark the Eaton Fire. Early in the morning on January 8, Jones was startled when her husband told her they needed to go because embers—“big chunks of fire,” as Jones put it—were falling into their yard.

The story of the Eaton Fire itself is tragic, and an omen: In ways that are straightforward and in ways that were largely unanticipated, global warming is quickly expanding the potential for large fires. But catastrophes also tend to reveal deficits in society, and the patterns of destruction and abandonment that followed the fire—which have roots in America’s past and its present—tell us something about the country’s future, too.

[From the July/August 2024 issue: What America owes the planet]

Many of the people escaping the fire had originally come to Altadena in flight: In the 20th century, Black folks seeking refuge from the Jim Crow South moved to California en masse, among them Butler’s grandmother from Louisiana. Redlining and restrictive covenants kept them from buying homes in Los Angeles and Pasadena, leaving unincorporated Altadena as a favored destination, particularly its western half.

For many of those who’d been part of the migration, or who’d heard the stories, the fire felt like the return of an old menace. The Eaton and Palisades Fires afflicted every class and demographic group. But the first response appeared much worse on the west side of Altadena, where the Black population was centered, than anywhere else. Of the more than 100 L.A. County fire trucks that went out to neighborhoods affected, only a single one entered West Altadena within the first 12 hours. According to an after-action report commissioned by the county, the homes there were older and more flammable, and—perhaps owing to power outages or weather interference with cell towers—–residents throughout Altadena said that they hadn’t received evacuation orders. All but one of the 19 reported deaths in Altadena occurred on the west side, which suffered the most catastrophic damage. Nearly half of all Black families in Altadena lost their home or sustained extensive damage.

Just as fire victims began the process of trying to recover, Donald Trump came back into power. Deep cuts at FEMA and other agencies targeted much of the federal machinery and sources of money that were supposed to help. AmeriCorps volunteers who’d staffed recovery programs were sent home, and residents reportedly had difficulty reaching FEMA agents on the phone. Six months after the fires, the federal aid received by victims, relative to their property damage, was less than a third of that provided after previous fires in California and Hawaii. FEMA declined to perform its customary soil testing after cleanups, and now independent tests indicate high levels of lead in several lots. Darlene Greene, a member of the town council representing a tract in West Altadena, told me that the ordeal of rebuilding had driven some of her constituents into mental-health crises.

Months passed and empty lots languished. Many residents, having purchased homes years ago, were severely underinsured, owing to increased building costs. As of early October, fewer than 500 rebuilding permits had been issued within the Eaton Fire perimeter.

Those who couldn’t abide all the delays and red tape have sold, in many cases for a fraction of what the land was worth, and in many cases to corporate entities. More sales might still be on the horizon. With much of their surroundings still burned out and with friends and families scattered, even people who didn’t lose their home in the fire might feel inclined to move away. “When you leave your house,” Jones told me, “you have to look up at the street sign because there’s no landmarks anymore.”

[Read: Who wants to live in the Palisades now?]

Greene said the setbacks that families have faced have been their own kind of disaster. In the first weeks after the fire, “I was very optimistic,” Greene told me, “and thinking that, Hey, you know, people will be able to come back and rebuild.” Now, she said, she doesn’t know about that.

Who needs imagination when the dystopia is right in front of you? During the Palisades and Eaton Fires, scenes played out that could have appeared in Butler’s Parable. Private firefighting outfits defended companies, utilities, and ultrarich enclaves while other parts of the city burned. The county’s defenses were overmatched. Its fleet of fire trucks was hobbled by ongoing consolidation in the fire-engine industry, where giant companies have been delaying maintenance orders and raising prices for new trucks. Hundreds of incarcerated people, making at most $10 a day, worked as firefighters for the state. All of these things at least partly reflect the increasing regularity, intensity, and cost of fires. They preview the kinds of problems that climate change will bring to our local governments and economies, manifesting most severely in poor and minority communities, but affecting us all.

One problem is who will underwrite disaster risks as they grow. Seven of the 12 largest home insurers in California—including State Farm, the very largest—have already limited their coverage or stopped taking new policies there. After the fires, State Farm proposed increasing its homeowner premiums by 22 percent statewide, and warned that it would need to “consider its options,” seeming to imply that it might unwind even its existing policies, if the state didn’t allow the increase (the two sides ultimately agreed on a 17 percent rate hike). The specter of huge future premium increases or whole-state withdrawals by insurers adds a new level of risk for every homeowner. Other insurers are also reconsidering their long-term positions, and asking to raise rates sharply.

There are parallels to the 2008 financial crisis, when entire communities were built over the rotten plank of subprime mortgages. Insurers lost more than $100 billion in underwriting in 2024, and “insurance deserts,” where policies are becoming impossible to find or prohibitively expensive, are growing in the South and the West—more than half a million Florida residents are down to just one state-established “insurer of last resort,” for example. Last year, a report from the Senate Budget Committee found that the withdrawal of insurers from many markets threatens “a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis similar to what occurred in 2008.” But it’s six one way, half a dozen the other: Insurers that stay in risky markets will be imperiled by unexpected disaster payouts, and might be destabilized if multiple disasters happen in different parts of the country at once.

[Read: Climate collapse could happen fast]

Even if climate change does not trigger a full-fledged economic panic, whole regions will be thinned out and impoverished. Residential areas are the centerpiece of local economies, yet without insurance, people cannot get mortgages, and so most cannot buy houses. The mere prospect of that makes business investment riskier. Jesse Keenan, a professor at Tulane University who studies climate change and real estate, told me that some places are already becoming economic “no-go” zones.

Keenan is not some lonely Cassandra. In February, in a report to the Senate Banking Committee, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned of exactly the same thing. “You know, if you fast-forward 10 or 15 years, there are going to be regions of the country where you can’t get a mortgage,” he said. “There won’t be ATMs. You know, the banks won’t have branches and things like that.” Leave it to the banker to think about the banks, but the same logic applies to everything else. In places that suffer an increasing number of climate disasters and don’t receive commensurate assistance, we should expect more food deserts, fewer libraries, and fewer small businesses. We should expect that, with a larger share of municipal budgets going to disaster mitigation and repair, city and county services will suffer or disappear. Even as local taxes rise, “service deserts” will spread, leaving the remaining populations with only shells of local government. These are the dead zones.

A flooded street in Miami in June 2022 (Joe Raedle / Getty)

In Butler’s Parable, corporations use global warming to their advantage, taking over distressed governments, buying up devastated lands, and providing housing to residents in exchange for cheap labor. Parts of this vision are manifesting in real life. Private-equity firms are deeply embedded in the disaster-recovery industry, sometimes relying on the low-wage labor of immigrants and incarcerated people in order to provide reconstruction services at cut rates. Investors often come into distressed real-estate markets and transform them, buying up land on the cheap and flipping residential homes into rental units. Essential services such as firefighting, disaster response, and cleanup are being slowly ceded by the public to the private sector in places under climate stress. Life in these places won’t be like life in the company towns of the 19th century, not exactly. But if you squint, it may not look that different, either.

These glimpses into tomorrow would warrant consternation under any administration. The United States cannot control global warming on its own, but it can exert a significant influence, directly and by example. President Joe Biden’s climate agenda was the most robust ever attempted in this country, but even he did not sign enough laws to produce the fair share of decarbonization that America would need to deliver in order to avert 2 degrees Celsius of warming—a threshold whose crossing would likely spur a mass drought in the Southwest and West, disrupt agriculture in the South, and bring deluges to Miami, Sacramento, and New York City. But our present government is actively working to worsen global warming and make communities less resilient to its effects. It is working to make the darkest futures more likely.

It is possible, even considering the hatchet blows that Donald Trump has delivered to the federal bureaucracy, public institutions, and the Constitution, that his legacy will be most felt in our climate. On his first day back in office, the president signed executive orders that will withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement—his second time pulling the country out of the global climate-change accord—and expand fossil-fuel production. In March, the Department of the Interior took steps to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a vanishing sliver of pristine wilderness whose climate is already rapidly warming.

Even while justifying the expansion of oil and gas production as “energy independence,” Trump has attacked renewable energy. In January, he suspended all new leasing of federal lands for wind-power production. In July, he signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which accelerated the phaseout of wind- and solar-power tax credits, ended the tax credit for consumers who purchase electric vehicles, and zeroed out penalties for automakers that don’t abide by fuel-economy standards. He has suggested that wind farms threaten American health, and has said he wants to ban new facilities outright.

Trump’s EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, came into office with the intent, he said, of “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate change religion.” He has since moved to slash the staff of the EPA’s emission-enforcement office. Zeldin is now leading an effort to kill the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” a 2009 declaration that greenhouse gases are harmful to human health. Without that finding, the federal government would no longer have the authority to regulate carbon pollution.

The Trump administration’s fixation on ending that “climate-change religion” fits the president’s general view that everything is a zero-sum struggle between two sides, and that he wins only when his opponents lose. By this standard, Trump is winning: According to an analysis from the Princeton-affiliated REPEAT Project, his administration’s actions have already erased all the future emission declines set in motion during Biden’s term.

Trump has even thrown wrenches into the energy-transition plans of other countries. In a trade deal with the European Union, the administration agreed to lower punitive tariffs in exchange for European companies’ purchase of $750 billion of American energy over the next three years, mostly oil and gas, a move that—if the EU enforces it—would throw Europe off its decarbonization targets. In August, U.S. officials released a statement pledging that the United States would “not hesitate to retaliate” against countries that voted in favor of a global agreement to lower emissions in international shipping.

As the administration accelerates climate change, it has also moved to weaken the country’s infrastructure for dealing with climate disruptions. Trump scrapped a program dedicated to funding flood mitigation in low-income communities. He axed rules that required public housing and critical infrastructure rebuilt with federal money to be elevated in order to account for new flood risks. The National Weather Service is a shadow of its former self, and the forecasters who help people make evacuation decisions are working double shifts just to keep offices open.

Even if Trump were to make a miraculous conversion to that climate-change religion today, some effects of these changes will be essentially irreversible. Once dismantled, bureaucracies are not so easy to replace. New wind farms won’t just pop up overnight. It would take time and investment merely to get back to our pre-Trump emissions baseline, let alone hit our national targets for averting a 2-degrees-hotter world.

This reality is so sobering that even staunch climate optimists have had to adjust. Since 2012, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the Democrats’ leaders on climate, has delivered more than 300 “Time to Wake Up” speeches about global warming on the floor. Earlier this year, Whitehouse acknowledged for the first time that it may actually be “too late to wake up.”

In search of more windows into our climate future, I traveled to a place where water is the agent of change. The first preview came as soon as I left my hotel. As I drove through Miami, a light rainstorm flooded the streets, sending water sloshing around my car’s tires and then over my shoes when I got out.

On the street during a heat wave in Miami in June 2023 (Giorgio Viera / AFP / Getty)

There are few places in America where climate change is made more obvious to the senses than in Miami. On some eroded beaches, you can wade or even swim out to where the land once reached. The seawalls along Biscayne Bay have gotten higher, and flooding from rainfall has become more and more of a problem. Crucial areas of Miami-Dade County are at or near sea level. And the sea level, as glaciers melt, is rising. A 2016 county report estimated that from 1992 to 2030, sea levels there would rise by up to 10 inches.

Somewhere between the inconvenience of wet feet and a potential Atlantis-style submergence are plenty of climate issues that make life more difficult. Weather patterns in South Florida have changed, and extreme rainfall has become more frequent, exacerbating the rising sea level. Last year, a “rain bomb” system dumped more than a foot of water on Miami in just two days. Until very recently, that was considered a once-in-200-years (or rarer)event—but it has now happened in the city four times in as many years. Salt water from the encroaching ocean threatens the drinking-water supply.

[From the March 2021 issue: The terrifying warning lurking in the earth’s ancient rock record]

And at the risk of stating the obvious, global warming is supercharging the city’s already daunting heat. In 2024, Miami-Dade County experienced 60 full days with heat indexes greater than 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The most dangerous change might be the spike in overnight temperatures, which robs resting bodies of the chance to recover from daytime heat, thus contributing to as many as 600 excess deaths from heat each year. The county is the epicenter of an incipient “extreme heat belt” that is reshaping concepts of seasonality and livability in the United States.

In Miami, denying climate change would be like denying the nose on one’s face. Even so, even knowing what’s coming, the city and surrounding county have struggled to protect themselves—and especially their most vulnerable residents. This was evident in the community where I was headed, Liberty City.

The water receded as the land sloped upward on my drive to the old site of Liberty Square, the second segregated housing project in the country built for Black residents. I passed buildings adorned with Technicolor murals of civil-rights icons. And I found the remnants of the old “race wall” that had been erected to separate Black residents from white.

In Miami, places known as “heat islands,” with little shade and lots of asphalt, are disproportionately inhabited by poor and working-class residents, and these can be 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than wealthy residential areas. Heat-related deaths and illnesses are concentrated among Black and Latino outdoor laborers. One of the worst such heat islands is Liberty City.

The neighborhood does, however, have one thing going for it, albeit one that may not benefit its current residents much longer. Historically, some of Miami’s most desirable real estate has been crowded along the beachfronts of the metropolitan area, with businesses and wealthy white residential enclaves prizing shore views and beach access. Meanwhile, neighborhoods farther inland—Liberty City, along with Overtown and Little Haiti—were designated for Black folks. They sit several feet higher above the ocean than the city’s prime real estate.

In 2018, a group of researchers led by Jesse Keenan found that property values in these higher-elevation areas were increasing relative to the city average. Theorizing that these price increases were driven by demand from developers and buyers fleeing inward from sinking coastal neighborhoods—and were displacing people already in the communities farther inland—Keenan and his colleagues coined the term climate gentrification.

Liberty City, a “heat island” that can be 10 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than more affluent parts of Miami, is nonetheless now in demand because it sits on high ground. (Kofi Oliver / Getty)

In Liberty City, climate gentrification gave Black residents a new way to think about a process that, until that point, had seemed like regular old gentrification. Rents for existing residents had been rising faster than the city average, and an upsurge in evictions followed. Homeowners—many facing a budget crunch from rising property-tax bills—had grown accustomed to getting offers to buy their homes for cash. Developers had plans to demolish Liberty Square and replace it with a kind of mixed-use Chipotleville, and there wasn’t much political will to stop displacement. Miami “was built upon inequity,” Kilan Ashad-Bishop, a professor at the University of Miami and a former member of the city’s Climate Resilience Committee, told me—“but this felt a little different.” Activism against climate gentrification and national attention grew such that Miami passed a resolution requiring a study on climate gentrification—although so far, that hasn’t accomplished much.

If the architectural renderings of trees, umbrellas, and awnings come to pass, some families of color might be able to hang on and enjoy the new amenities. But many who are displaced will find it difficult to rent or buy anywhere else in the city with similar elevation. Even if they buy farther inland, climate change will still hang over their finances. Home-insurance premiums are soaring in South Florida towns that aren’t beach-adjacent, too—the whole area is hurricane-prone. And the number of insurance nonrenewals is actually highest inland, where many lower-middle-class homeowners have had to drop policies they can no longer afford. The geography of real climate risk—which includes not just the effects of weather and disasters, but also the ability of communities to withstand them—looks roughly similar to the geographies of poverty and race.

The same holds true across the hottest, most volatile regions of America. In Houston, homeowners in minority communities damaged by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 were the least likely to receive loans and federal grants for rebuilding. In Chicago, the inland American city with the greatest number of properties at substantial risk of flooding, communities of color have been immensely overrepresented among flood victims. In Alabama, which is now part of America’s Tornado Alley because of the changing climate, the people least able to rebuild (and who live in shoddier homes that tend to sustain more damage) are likely to be poor and Black.

The climate itself does not discriminate; climate catastrophe will distress the middle class and inevitably sweep away even mansions in gated neighborhoods. But in the next 30 years, the people who will bear the brunt of that catastrophe—who will be dispossessed, uprooted, and exposed to the worst of the elements—will be those who are already on the other side of society’s walls.

In the 1930s, rolling black dust storms blanketed America’s Great Plains, uprooting topsoil and crops across 100 million acres of land. The clouds billowed as far east as New York, choking farm economies in the middle of the country and sending millions of people on the move. The black blizzards seemed to many like divine judgment; actually, they had their origins at least partly in human action. Years of deep plowing and overgrazing had eroded the earth, priming the Plains to become what we know now as the Dust Bowl.

As these storms darkened the prairies, farmers and laborers alike sought refuge. Many of them traveled hundreds of miles to California and other havens. Despite the passage of New Deal programs to aid these “Okies,” many did not receive a warm welcome in their new homes, because some saw them as interlopers competing for housing and jobs. In one ugly episode, Los Angeles Police Department Chief James Edgar Davis stationed more than 100 officers along the California border to enforce a “bum blockade” against migrants. California had made it a misdemeanor for any citizen to transport an “indigent” person into the state, a law that was later overturned by the Supreme Court. The Court’s decision became part of the established basis for a right that many Americans take for granted—the ability to travel freely across state lines.

As Octavia Butler believed, America’s past is a good place to start when trying to predict how climate change will reconfigure its society in the future. The country has already seen large, sudden movements of people driven by disaster and local changes in climate. These upheavals have always caused tensions, and those tensions have shaped the American social order in many ways.

Within the U.S. today, people are again moving because of disasters, and because of the slow-grind attrition of heat, flooding, and rising insurance rates. Earlier this year, the nonprofit Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre found that disasters had caused 11 million evacuations or relocations in the previous 12 months. These numbers will climb. Without interstate coordination and federal relief funding, workers and politicians in receiving zones may try to keep out newcomers—especially poor ones, arriving en masse on the heels of a particular disaster—as they did during the Dust Bowl.

In his forthcoming book, aptly titled North: The Future of Post-Climate America, Keenan anticipates a major climate migration—out of the South to cooler, less volatile climes—driven partly by disaster but also by a simple preference for milder weather. Over the past half century, one of the fundamentals of American life has been the steady relocation of people—and of the country’s center of gravity—to the Sun Belt. Southern metropolises such as Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, and Charlotte expanded rapidly. But, according to Keenan, climate change has essentially stopped growth in southward movement, and northern cities are seeing fewer outflows and greater influxes of people.

Keenan’s observation aligns with a recent study published by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which found that for decades, hotter places tended to grow faster than colder ones. But from 2010 to 2020, that pattern ceased. And for elderly people, whose long-term comfort is a big part of the choice of destination, it had outright reversed.

In the next 30 years, climate disruptions won’t make whole states unlivable, and demographic shifts might not reach full exodus levels. But in America, small change is often deeply felt, and bit by bit, the American economy and culture will likely be transformed by climate attrition and the redistribution of people. Southern states will lose residents and dynamism. Bad weather and ruined infrastructure will sap productivity and leave behind thousands of acres of abandoned farmland after crop failures. Houston faces potentially extreme damage if struck by a Category 4 or 5 hurricane, and might struggle to rebuild without substantial federal aid. Even absent another disaster, New Orleans has been the fastest-shrinking major metro area in the country in recent years, as more people have sought high ground or been priced out of the market by rising insurance rates. The populations of several cities and counties in California’s fire country are shrinking, and domestic migration to Miami is now outpaced by people leaving (though international arrivals have so far kept the city’s population from declining).

The worst climate disruptions will happen beyond U.S. borders, but they will put pressure on American society nonetheless. Migration to the southern border, perhaps the most powerful current in American politics today, is already being driven partly by ecological collapses in Central American farm economies. International monitors expect these pressures to grow over the next several years. If the country’s policy today is at all indicative, detention camps for immigrants will proliferate, often in climate dead zones, and the southern border will become even more militarized.

This would not be an America where the founding ideals hold much sway. The movement of people might even set states against one another. Tensions in receiving zones will—without strong, growing economies—create more opportunities for demagoguery. In dead zones, the dearth of public services and the fading imprimatur of the state will naturally erode local participatory democracy.

All of this could create even better conditions than those today for the kind of transactional authoritarian government that Trump is trying to establish. Xenophobia and racism are already pillars of this movement, and they would be strengthened by mass migration. State and local leaders affected by disasters might supplicate themselves to the president in order to receive the patronage of disaster aid. A hurricane or megafire during election season might be a convenient excuse for federal intervention.

The emerging Trump doctrine views empathy as a weakness and public welfare as a usurpation of the natural hierarchy. His authoritarianism is perfectly suited to an era of climate strife.

At the end of August, almost 20 years to the day after Hurricane Katrina, I drove across the Claiborne Avenue Bridge to New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. The neighborhood was mostly obliterated in 2005, after the levees that were supposed to protect it failed. Today it is still in rough shape. Inhabited homes are sparsely distributed, and grassy lots fill many of the spaces where houses previously stood. There are few businesses to speak of. Before Katrina, 15,000 people lived here. Now that number is closer to 5,000. A casualty of what is often considered America’s first great climate disaster, the Lower Ninth Ward also has an antecedent in Butler’s work. In Parable of the Sower, a hurricane devastates the Gulf region, and most of its victims are poor folks “who don’t hear the warnings until it’s too late for their feet to take them to safety.”

Steps remain where a house once stood in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, 20 years after Hurricane Katrina. The community has never fully recovered. (Brandon Bell / Getty)

The Lower Ninth Ward was a harbinger of what climate change might do to our most vulnerable places. But it has also been a place of reverence for people who wish to fight climate change. At the TEP Center, a museum and community center there, I met former Vice President Al Gore, at ease in an oxford shirt and a magnificent pair of cowboy boots. He and the Climate Reality Project, the nonprofit he founded, were in the middle of a tour through Louisiana, holding listening sessions and dialogues with climate-justice advocates to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Katrina.

I was seeking assurances—any science I hadn’t seen, any hope Gore had on hand—that the Earth might be able to avoid the worst of climate change, even with America now accelerating warming. I was not encouraged by the news that global temperatures last year had already risen above the 1.5-degree warming ceiling that the Paris Agreement had established as a goal in 2015, and looked to be staying above it this year. Gore has been the world’s biggest cheerleader for that target. If there was a silver lining to be had, he would know what it was.

[Al Gore: America is close to a ‘political tipping point’ on climate change]

But Gore was more measured—or, as he called it, “textured”—in his assessment than I’d expected, at least initially. After all, he followed the data. “I am not willing to call it now and say, ‘No, we’ve crossed 1.5,’ because the scientists are not willing to say that now,” he told me, cautioning that the actual threshold uses an average calculated over several years, not just one or even two. “As a practical matter, we can see the writing on the wall. However, calling it would also have some consequences.”

Still, he said, even if that call is soon made, climate action will remain just as urgent. Each bit of global warming that is averted beyond that matters—1.6 is better than 1.7. And for what it’s worth, he told me, other countries do grasp that. “In focusing on what Trump and his gang are doing, I think we miss the changes that are under way in the rest of the world,” Gore said, “and in many places, it’s moving more quickly in the right direction.” If anything, the United States’ retreat from climate leadership has encouraged countries such as Brazil to provide it.

Possible futures may be narrowing, but they are narrowing from both directions: Globally, future emissions have already been slashed enough to make the worst-case scenarios projected a decade ago—4 or more degrees Celsius of warming by 2100—unlikely, even as the best case moves out of reach. And Gore believes that the now-obvious progression of climate change—the heat waves, floods, fires, and other disasters—is itself becoming a kind of asset in the fight to stop it. “Mother Nature is the most powerful advocate that has a voice on this matter,” he said. “And I do believe that she is winning the argument.”

Gore was buoyed by the grassroots energy that global climate activism has cultivated. “This has now become”—with relatively little fanfare—“the largest political movement in the history of the world,” he told me. And neither markets nor investors can afford to wholly deny the environmental physics in front of them. Even in the U.S., share prices for green energy continue to increase as renewables become cheaper—and as sustainability becomes less of a watchword and more of a meat-and-potatoes consideration for businesses hoping to preserve future profits.

The previous day, Gore had spoken at a “climate revival” at a church in St. James Parish, in what’s known as “Cancer Alley,” a set of communities upriver from New Orleans that struggle not only with climate risks but also with a long legacy of industrial pollution and governmental neglect. The stories of many residents had stayed with him. “I think that the sacrifice zones—I hate to endorse that phrase by using it, but the people who live there often do,” Gore began. “I think they may, in political terms, represent a stone that the builder refused.” He was referring to the biblical passage about a cast-off object becoming the cornerstone of a new edifice, which later became a parable for the faith built on Christ’s resurrection.

Al Gore during Climate Week in New York in September. The former vice president remains optimistic that the darkest futures can still be avoided. (LeMar Charles / Beyond Petrochemicals)

It was the morsel of hope that I was perhaps most prepared to receive. Our country’s “sacrifice zones” are both illustrations of our hotter future and indictments of our democracy’s faults. They are perfect avatars for the kind of project that climate action now needs: one that links our climate to our freedom.

I am personally not optimistic about the chances of averting significant climatic chaos. America has shown that it has not absorbed the fundamental lessons that Katrina previewed 20 years ago. The first and worst effects of the climate crisis have so far been mostly in places that—like the Lower Ninth Ward—are not high on many policy makers’ priority lists. Because of that fact, it has always been difficult to prompt preemptive action to save everyone else.

All of that said, perhaps Trump, through his very extremity, has provided a galvanizing opportunity. In his reflexive culture-warrior rejection of climate change, he has backed into a climate policy of his own, and has linked that policy to his power. With his single-minded, bullying determination to reverse course on renewables—which are part of life now for many people of all political stripes—and to dismantle programs people rely on, Trump has essentially taken ownership of any future climate disruptions, and has more firmly connected them to oil and gas. In advancing this climate-accelerationist policy alongside an antidemocratic agenda, he has sealed off fantasies of compromise and raised the political salience of dead zones, where devastation and exclusion go hand in hand. Trump’s intertwining of climate policy and authoritarianism may beget its own countermovement: climate democracy.

Climate democracy would be aided by the gift of simplicity. At present, the only way to ensure that America avoids the future outlined here will be to win back power from its strongman leader, or possibly his successors. The places facing existential climate risks—especially those in the Deep South—are mostly in states that have long been considered politically uncompetitive, where neither party expends much effort or money to gain votes. But they could form a natural climate constituency, outside the normal partisan axis. Poor and middle-class white communities in coastal Alabama, Mexican American neighborhoods in Phoenix, and Black towns in the Mississippi Delta might soon come to regard climate catastrophe as the greatest risk they face, not by way of scientific persuasion, but by way of hard-earned experience. Some of them might form the cornerstone of a new movement.

With the right message, plenty of other people may be persuadable: those upset by higher electric bills, or poorer storm forecasts, or the coziness of Trump with the oil and gas industry, or weather-related disruptions in everyday life. To paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, Americans learn best from catastrophe, and they will learn that the help they once took for granted after disasters might now be harder to come by. Autocracy takes time to solidify, and building popular support in opposition to it takes time as well. But in the reaction needed to build climate democracy, perhaps heat is a catalyst.

I realized that, in visiting sites of catastrophe and upheaval, I’d also visited epicenters of climate democracy. In Altadena, Darlene Greene still did yeoman’s work to support her struggling constituents, and—in the absence of help from above—residents became the leaders their community needed. In Miami, groups of homeowners and tenants were united in fighting climate gentrification, and in trying to keep their homes. In the Lower Ninth Ward, people from across the country who’d been moved to climate action by Katrina convened with Al Gore and strategized.

It isn’t really a coincidence that these places, and the places where America’s climate retreat will begin, roughly overlap with the geography of historic conflicts over civil rights and democracy. Where risk and disinvestment come together in America, democracy has always suffered. In many ways, crisis is revelatory, and we know that disasters expose cracks in society. If there is a sliver of a chance of averting the scenarios I’ve laid out, it will have to come by the hands of a movement that finally repairs those cracks.

It is easiest, as I have done, to imagine those faults persisting and widening, in which case the worst conclusions about our future physical and political climates are likely to hold true. But the last of Octavia Butler’s rules for predicting the future should also guide our imagination, and our hopes. She instructed students to “count on the surprises,” and even when making grounded predictions to allow for the possibility of genuine inspiration and rupture. After all, Butler’s own success—as a child of a Black family that moved West from Jim Crow Louisiana during the Great Migration—would have been considered very unlikely at the moment of her birth. None of the great movements that shaped this country was preordained.

This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “The Dead Zones.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

D’Angelo Conjured More Than Music

2025-10-18T12:51:00-04:00

When I was a kid, living in Lawrenceville, Virginia, I heard tales about how the James River was haunted: perhaps by the spirits of Indigenous people who were forced off this land, or maybe by those who gave their lives to revolution, or maybe by enslaved men, women, and children who drowned while trying to escape their plantations. The ghost stories seemed to suit a river that’s connected to America’s soul. Supernatural or not, the James carries a certain significance, traveling through the capital of the Confederacy and then to the first colonial capitals, following the contours of the nation’s story. It’s a wellspring for historians and conjurers alike.

One of the greatest of those conjurers is now gone. D’Angelo, the musician born Michael Eugene Archer, died on Tuesday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was an enigma who defined a musical era, a recluse who battled his own demons, a runner who—in the tradition of his forefathers—sought a modicum of liberation for himself and his people. At just 51 years old, D’Angelo joined the ranks of many Black luminaries who shone brightly but not long.

For much of D’Angelo’s career, critics seemed to most appreciate his brilliance by way of comparison. After the release of his 1995 debut album, Brown Sugar, he was anointed as the vanguard of the nebulously defined “neo-soul” sound—a modern-day Smokey Robinson with straight-back braids. With his follow-up masterwork, Voodoo, D’Angelo was deemed an heir to Prince, another funk virtuoso whose sex-charged music upended R&B orthodoxy. What that type of praise seemed to value most wasn’t necessarily what D’Angelo was saying or trying to do, but the bygone mastery he evoked. For an artist who had alchemized his collection of Prince, A Tribe Called Quest, Roberta Flack, and Marvin Gaye records into a beautiful sound of his own, this was never a slight. But it did always feel like a flattening of a kind.

This flattening was evident in other ways too. Any number of obituaries and tributes have mentioned the music video for his hit single “Untitled (How Does It Feel),” in which a seemingly nude D’Angelo sang directly to the camera and, at times, toward his unseen pelvis. The video was considered near-pornographic by many viewers, and it went as close to viral as was possible in the pre-social-media world, driving the commercial success of the single and the album. At concerts, screaming fans began to demand that D’Angelo strip, some even throwing money on stage. As the legend goes, the wave of objectification was so massive that it sent him into seclusion for more than a decade.

D’Angelo performs during KMEL Summer Jam at Shoreline Amphitheatre on August 3, 1996, in Mountain View, California. (Tim Mosenfelder / Getty)

In interviews over the years, D’Angelo tried to downplay that version of the story, but what’s clear at least is that he felt discomfort over the idea of his image becoming bigger and more important than his music. He was born in Richmond, Virginia, and raised in another town on the James River, growing up in a fire-and-brimstone Pentecostal church where he learned piano and other instruments at an early age. As the son of pastors, he’d absorbed the dogma that man was inherently fallen, and utterly irredeemable without the grace of God. One way to claim that grace was through displays of spirit, which the right music could coax out of even the most staid congregants. While preachers preached, D’Angelo learned ministry from the choir stand, leading the flock to epiphany one measure at a time. He never left behind that intentionality of purpose, even when music became business.

But the church also taught that the power of music could be corrupting. There have long been debates in churches about whether just listening to worldly music was sinful, let alone playing it. Music could bring people to sin just as easily as it could bring them to salvation, and if its holy iteration brought the faithful to the climax of speaking in tongues, then its unholy version promised a climax of the flesh. D’Angelo found power in this duality, smashing the barriers between the spiritual and the secular, as had so many Black music pioneers before him. He built songs about sex with chords from a Hammond organ that sounded like it was still plugged in at a choir loft. He described the capitalist pursuit of wealth as a devil’s bargain, and spoke of curses placed on him by vengeful root-workers. In borrowing from a patchwork of references, and steeping them in a brew both sacred and profane, D’Angelo was doing more than homage. He was conjuring.

As well regarded as Voodoo is, it’s rarely discussed as a statement about Blackness and the world. Raphael Saadiq’s woozy bass line and fiery guitar licks announce “Untitled” as a clear Prince tribute, and the album’s sonic peak. But immediately after, “Africa” directly samples Prince, and also channels the Purple One’s underrated penchant for commentary. In that song, D’Angelo uses the occasion of his son’s birth to consider his ancestry. The drums are gentle and stirring; the arrangement evokes a pulsing lullaby. Written with Angie Stone, D’Angelo’s former partner (who also died earlier this year) and the mother of one of his children, the song ponders what it means to be part of a larger story of grief, hope, and struggle. “Africa is my descent / and here I am far from home,” he sings. “I dwell within a land that’s meant for many men not my tone.” The lyrics position the song, and perhaps the album, as something of an inheritance, a legacy that will live beyond its creators’ lives.

D’Angelo clearly viewed his own creations differently than many onlookers. The attempt by critics to define his work as “neo-soul”—and by extension, to sometimes cast his collaborators and fellow travelers as homage acts—was always instructive. “I never claimed I do neo-soul, you know,” D’Angelo told an interviewer in 2014. Instead, he preferred to say that he made “Black music.” Not a recycling, but a continuation—a long communion with the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be born.

D’Angelo performs at the Aire Crown Theater on April 4, 2000, in Chicago, Illinois. (Paul Natkin / Wireimage / Getty)

This was all perhaps most evident on D’Angelo’s third studio album, which turned out to be his swan song. Black Messiah, released after a long hiatus—which included documented struggles with addiction and mental health, and related legal troubles—was messier and less interested in abiding by genre than his previous efforts. There were stabs at horny lounge jazz, a melodramatic Latin guitar ballad, even a folksy blues number. Yet the songs, situated in the melange of Black music, cohered through D’Angelo’s resolve. The album’s musical expansiveness was matched by the breadth of its social commentary. On “Till It’s Done (Tutu)” he worries about climate change, and presents a conundrum that’s newly relevant in today’s flood- and fire-stricken America: “The question ain’t ‘Do we have resources to rebuild?’ It’s ‘Do we have the will?’”

In “1000 Deaths,” D’Angelo’s voice is nearly drowned by the chaotic mix, a wall of guitar and bass that evokes apocalyptic fire and uprisings in Black ghettos. The lyrics are purposefully difficult to parse, but they are not without meaning. In what functions as the song’s chorus, D’Angelo sings, “Because a coward dies a thousand times / but a soldier only dies just once.” In chanting “Yahweh, Yeshua”—the Hebrew names for God and Jesus Christ—he presents himself as a soldier for the godhead. But his Christ is Black. The album’s title calls back to this image of a revolutionary Black Jesus, a Messiah for America’s modern racial strife. It also references the secret COINTELPRO program, run by the notorious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and designed to infiltrate and sabotage civil-rights organizations across the country. In the late 1960s, Hoover’s office sent a memo warning of the potential rise of an earthly Black “messiah,” a leader who might unite Black communities in opposition to American oppression.

D’Angelo and his collaborators had intended for Black Messiah to be released in 2015, and many of the songs had existed in some form for years. But in 2014, rage in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, over the killing of Michael Brown by police helped stoke a movement that shaped the next decade of American life. The band and studio worked feverishly to get the record out in time to meet the moment, and it arrived in the winter of 2014. It was not D’Angelo returning to the world, but the world finally catching up to him.

If the ongoing American crises of culture, technology, and government share a common thread, it’s the steady advance of—for lack of a better term—fake shit. Our phones are turning into pocket-size casinos, offering windowless retreats from the real. Bots argue with bots on social media, and the slop churned out by AI is then regurgitated by different AI. The stock market seems ever more divorced from economic fundamentals, and the American military is being ordered around by a man who watches news clips of his own debates and rallies and grows convinced by his own made-up arguments. At the bottom of our splintering reality, there is still real art—real endeavors, inspirations, and feelings. But more and more, they’re covered in mounds of fake shit.

To me, one antidote for those malaises is the embrace of craft for craft’s sake. D’Angelo could become a patron saint for this ethos. He was infamously particular, and his relative lack of studio output compared with his peers wasn’t a result of disinterest in making music, but rather the opposite. He made so much music, both within the studio and without, but he deemed only a part of that corpus worth sharing with the world.

The traditional containers of albums and singles never seemed to be enough to hold his intentions. D’Angelo approached making music the way Black grandmothers approach making biscuits on Sunday before church; the way dorm hair braiders approach stitched cornrows; the way bandleaders in New Orleans approach second lines; the way fire-and-brimstone preachers approach Easter service; the way quilters approach quilting. Drawing on knowledge passed down from the ages, they work hard to perfect their craft, not just because of the promise of a transaction or consumption, but because the doing is the thing. So it is with making music, and the impossible task of assigning form to the ineffable. Sometimes the process is slow, painful, inefficient, or imperfect. But we don’t make art because it’s quick and easy.

One common Black folk analogue to the craft of music-making is that of witchcraft. Robert Johnson sold his soul for the blues; Jimi Hendrix was himself a voodoo chile. In this tradition, there is something transcendent or ethereal about the power of music, and about those trained to wield it, who raise the dead and stir the living. But as in witchcraft, the process can be arduous and uncertain. And it always costs something.

Even the most fantastic stories of roots and voodoo have always captivated me, not necessarily because I want to believe, but because I see in them attempts to explain the real ways that human endeavor and experience extend beyond the physics of this world. In those stories, rivers tend to have special significance: as ritual sites, as fonts of mystic energy, as places where you might depart one world and enter another. For those who seek the other side, whether it be with Charon in the Styx or the ferryman on the James, some sort of craft is necessary.

Fifty Years After History’s Most Brutal Boxing Match

2025-09-16T07:00:00-04:00

It was oven-hot inside the arena, and that was before the fight began. The building’s air-conditioning had already lost the undercard against the tropical sun, and the air was thick with humidity. Still, almost 30,000 people waited with sweat soaking their shirts, standing on tiptoe to get a glimpse of the men walking toward the center of the arena. From one side, draped in a dark-blue robe and flanked by an entourage in matching work shirts, Joe Frazier walked slowly through the crowd, stern and granite-jawed. A ripple of applause passed through the arena.

From the other side of the arena, dressed in a white satin robe with his name embroidered on the back, walked Muhammad Ali. Even at age 33, approaching the twilight of his career, Ali was electromagnetic, drawing the crowd to its feet and polarizing its constituents all at once. The noise was raucous. When match officials placed a more-than-three-foot-tall trophy in the middle of the ring, Ali grabbed it and feigned running away with it. In the ring, after his name was announced, he pantomimed heartbreak as boos overcame the adulation. Frazier, whose ring demeanor generally toggled between glowering and frowning, glowered.

This was the third bout between Frazier and Ali. Held on October 1, 1975, in the Philippine Coliseum, the fight is remembered by many who attended as the best heavyweight contest in history, and possibly the pinnacle of the sport. The match was the first ever broadcast live overseas by satellite, and hundreds of millions of people watched from abroad.

It was not the most dazzling display of pugilism as an art. There were no knockdowns, no calls from commentators that now live on as sound bites. The significance of the fight was more narrative than technical, and its appeal was elemental: a bitter test of wills and an exploration of the outer limits of human endurance. The final contest between Ali and Frazier was the culmination of a relationship that had begun in friendship but curdled into deep enmity, the decisive battle in a war that had become larger than the two men in the ring. The match was filled with contradictions. It had been pitched as an announcement of the arrival of the postcolonial Third World—but staged in part to help cover up the abuses of an autocratic regime supported by the U.S. government. It would be a showcase for all of the beauty and ugliness of boxing, a sport that made the world smaller by making tall tales of men. Looking back now, 50 years later, the event reveals—perhaps more than any other since—the ways that sport can be a mirror to society and the soul.

Ali and Frazier faced each other as the bell rang. And so began the Thrilla in Manila.

The two fighters advanced, Ali jogging enthusiastically and Frazier plodding, cautious. They put up their guards and began to maneuver and dance, keeping their feet moving as they surveyed each other. Ali kept his hands high while Frazier reached out, almost gently, with a shot to the abdomen. Ali hit back with light left jabs as Frazier probed further, gauging Ali’s reaction time as he shifted his guard.

Their measurements taken, the fighters increased their intensity. Ali aimed to knock Frazier out early, at times holding the shorter man off by extending his left fist straight out, like a football stiff-arm, while he waited for openings to strike with his coiled right. Frazier, though, was relentless, seeking a way inside Ali’s reach, driving blows into Ali’s ribs but moving too fast to get caught by the night-ender Ali had planned.

Ali had spent much of the previous month telling any reporter who would listen how slow and tired the 31-year-old Frazier was, but it was immediately clear that the two were evenly matched. The crowd roared when they exchanged combinations, when Ali jawed at Frazier, and when Frazier yelled back. When the bell rang at the end of the first round, Frazier tapped Ali on the butt, almost playfully, as if to let him know: I’m here.

Associated Press

Joe Frazier was two years younger than Muhammad Ali, but Ali had a significant edge in height and reach.

Jerry Izenberg used his walker to prop open the door of his ranch-style house and beckoned me inside. “I used to be a lot faster,” he said. We were in Henderson, Nevada, a suburb of Las Vegas in the foothills of the McCullough Range. His house bears all the hallmarks of a Vegas retirement refuge—a rock garden, a brilliant-green turf lawn, a view of the Strip across the Mojave Desert. But Izenberg is not retired. In his mid-90s, he still writes columns for the Newark Star-Ledger in New Jersey, making him likely the oldest working sports journalist in America. (Dave Goren, the executive director of the National Sports Media Association, told The Atlantic that “if there’s an active sports journalist older than Jerry, I have no idea who it might be.”) His book about the heyday of heavyweight boxers, Once There Were Giants, was released in 2017.

As he talked about his 74 years of sportswriting, the ease with which Izenberg recalled the fights he covered decades ago, and even the scorecards of specific rounds, astonished me. But he reached a different level of clarity when we talked about Ali and Frazier’s final fight. Izenberg leaned closer, recounting the entire match, blow by blow, and quoting the two fighters as they spoke to each other in the ring. It was the greatest match he’d ever seen in person.

In late September 1975, Izenberg landed in Manila. The flight from San Francisco had been packed with sports reporters, and they were all transported to the Bayview Plaza, where the promoter Don King had arranged accommodations for journalists. The hotel, famed for its views of the sunset over Manila Bay, had been well stocked for the incoming brigade of thirsty men. They flocked to the bar for Joe’s Knuckle Punch, a drink made with lambanog, a local palm liquor that supposedly wouldn’t come with a hangover. The reporters drank for lunch and for dinner, and some stayed up late, talking politics over cocktails.

By the time Izenberg arrived, Ali and Frazier had been in Manila for days in order to acclimate to the heat and prepare for the fight. Frazier had gotten there first, landing at the airport at dawn. He was greeted on the tarmac by security guards and taken to his hotel.

Ali’s arrival was more of a spectacle. His team had delayed the plane’s departure from Honolulu so that instead of getting to Manila before dawn, Ali would arrive just after 6 a.m., which provided enough light for television cameras—and also coincided with the news hour back in the States. Hundreds of people crowded the runway to greet Ali, pushing against a cordon of soldiers armed with truncheons. As Ali stopped to address the crowd and the cameras, a disturbance broke out between the jostling spectators and the soldiers. “I don’t want any fighting here,” Ali said. He praised Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the president and first lady of the country, and bantered with the crowd, then launched into a poem he’d workshopped back home: “It will be a killa’, chilla’, thrilla’ / when I get that gorilla in Manila.” The rapturous arrival struck a chord with President Marcos, who aspired to build his own cult of personality in the Philippines. “I’d have to kill him,” he allegedly later said about Ali, “if he was a Filipino.” It was a joke, but only halfway.

Staged in a former U.S. colony just five months after the fall of Saigon, the fight was billed as a showcase for a new postcolonial era. With no evident sense of irony, Ali had likened his role as an international figure to that of a “Black Kissinger,” a statesman for the Third World. Ali had recently taken huge purses, negotiated by King, for the “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa, Zaire, and a title defense in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. But in Zaire, he had been the guest of the kleptocratic dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, who’d paid handsomely for the good press. Marcos hoped to receive similarly favorable publicity.

[Read: Muhammad Ali and the importance of identity]

Under Marcos’s rule—which was propped up publicly by U.S. military aid and secretly by CIA assistance—the Philippines had been transformed into a police state. In 1972, in the name of fighting communism and terrorism, Marcos had declared martial law, granting himself supreme power. Three years into his regime, it had become commonplace for Filipinos to have family members who’d been disappeared, or to encounter the mutilated bodies of the president’s political opponents, left on the streets as warnings.

One way that the Marcoses managed their reputation at home and abroad was through glitzy events that projected the Philippines as a booming, modernized state. The fight—for which they paid millions in purse money, promotion, and setup—was among the boldest examples. Nobody who knew the country was ever really fooled, and even Kissinger—the white one—warned President Richard Nixon that he thought Ferdinand Marcos was a self-serving tyrant. But boy, could he put on a show.

It was always unclear whether Ali’s wide-eyed embrace of authoritarian regimes was a product of naivete or something more calculated. As with all things Ali, the boundaries between theater and reality were purposefully vague. But he readily availed himself of the Marcoses’ hospitality, taking members of his entourage to parties and events. When Ali’s mistress appeared at a state reception in Manila, Ali’s wife, Khalilah, flew to the Philippines in a fury. Asked by the press about the fight, she responded tersely, “I’m going to root for the best man to win tonight—whomever that turns out to be.”

In many ways, the extracurriculars—the women, the parties, the junkets—were all standard Ali fare by this point. A week before the match, Izenberg wrote that when it came to time, “he never has as much as he would like because there are so many things he wants to say and do before the bell rings. Some of them even concern the fight.”

Michael Brennan / Getty

But Ali’s antics in Manila had a more vicious edge. He leaned into his portrayal of the darker-skinned Frazier as more animal than human, even going so far as to wear a shirt imprinted with the image of a gorilla to the weigh-in. He had brought a toy gorilla to a press conference announcing the fight and pretended his sparring partners were gorillas. During one of Frazier’s training sessions in Manila, Ali taunted him from the rafters. One night, Frazier heard shouting from outside his hotel window. He looked down from his balcony and saw Ali pointing a pistol at him. Ali and his team would later say that the pistol was a toy, but the truth has never been determined.

Frazier’s time in Manila was less remarkable. During press conferences, he always called Ali by his last name at birth—a growled, clipped “Clay,” as if even that one word was too much acknowledgment. He spent downtime at a villa in the mountainous outskirts of Manila, passing hours in monk-like silence. Cutting an image that contrasted with Ali’s more libertine act, Frazier traveled with his family, including his teenage son, Marvis, an aspiring boxer himself. Marvis had greeted Ali at the airport when he arrived in Manila, and was on hand to witness his delivery of the “gorilla” rhyme in front of the crowd.

When reporters asked Frazier about Ali’s abuse, he would point to his children and ask how he could be an animal with such beautiful kids. He brushed off most of the taunts. But inside, as he later wrote in his autobiography, Frazier seethed. He wanted to kill Ali, or die trying.

Takeo Tanuma / Sports Illustrated / Getty

Ali and Frazier meet with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in September 1975, shortly before fighting for the world heavyweight championship.

Frazier was making his point early. Ali had assumed he was slow, creaky, and dangerous only with his left hand. But Frazier was a new man in Manila. Ali was scoring plenty with jabs and flurries, but his attempts to land big punches mostly fell flat.

By the third round, the temperature in the arena may have reached 120 degrees. Ali gave up trying for a quick knockout blow and instead allowed Frazier to push him back into a corner, hoping to employ the “rope a dope” strategy he’d used so effectively against George Foreman in Kinshasa. Ali covered his face and tried to absorb Frazier’s metronomic body blows, aiming to tire him. Twice, Ali taunted Frazier, beckoning him to hit him. Frazier obliged, surprising Ali with a cross and an uppercut from his supposedly weak right arm.

Ali began trying to clinch Frazier, putting his gloves behind the shorter man’s head and seeking to weigh him down. The two-man dance became a triad as the referee, Carlos “Sonny” Padilla Jr., repeatedly pulled the men apart and scolded Ali.

Ali had often ridiculed Frazier for turning fights into slogs. Now he was in the mud himself. Despite it all, he managed his usual jabs to the chin and eyes, but Frazier seemed unfazed. Realizing the shift in rhythm, during the fifth round, Ali snarled at Frazier: “You ain’t got no right hand! What are you doing?”

Izenberg first met Cassius Clay in Rome, while covering the 1960 Olympics. Clay was an 18-year-old amateur then, the Louisville golden boy who’d already captured eight regional Golden Gloves and two nationals. He was a dyslexic kid who’d chafed at the indignities of growing up Black in a visibly segregated city, and for whom the lynching of Emmett Till in 1955 was deeply traumatic. Precocious, loud, and ambitious, he was discovered early by local trainers and promoters, and proved to be a boxing prodigy. He knew early that the sport would be his way out.

At the Olympics, he was skinnier than you probably remember him, and the warrior-poet braggadocio that later defined him was still embryonic. His surprising gold medal in the light-heavyweight division, over a Polish champion seven years his senior, made Clay something of a household name in the States.

Izenberg didn’t actually watch Clay fight in the Olympics, but remembers him cracking jokes in the Olympic Village. “Athletes are walking by,” Izenberg told me. Many didn’t speak English, but something about Clay captivated them, especially the women. They “walked past him, turned around, walked back a few feet to take a look at him,” Izenberg said. Later, Izenberg got in touch with the young champion, who begged him to come watch a fight. The two struck up a friendship that lasted for the rest of Ali’s life.

Joe Frazier, two years younger than Ali, arrived at stardom on a Greyhound bus. He was born to a Gullah sharecropping family in South Carolina’s Sea Islands. The shack where he and 12 siblings lived had been built by his father out of scrap lumber; luxuries such as plumbing belonged to another world. Like most sharecropping children, Frazier started working on the farm early. In his flickers of leisure time, at 8 years old, he made his own heavy bag, stuffed with moss, and tried to train himself to be the next Joe Louis. But a hard life made its mark. One day, he fell and seriously injured his left arm while trying to wrangle the family’s 300-pound hog. The family had no money for doctors, and the arm healed crooked, forever limiting his reach and range of motion. But, as Frazier liked to say, the arm’s awkward angle kept it “permanently cocked” for a left hook, which would become his signature punch.

At 15, Frazier joined the Great Migration, taking a bus north to New York and then settling in Philadelphia, where he landed work at a slaughterhouse. He was 18 before he finally received his first formal boxing training, at a Police Athletic League gym in Philly. He worked out obsessively, carrying his own record player to the gym late at night and training solo to the soundtrack of Otis Redding and Sam Cooke. The hard-nosed, straightforward style that he developed suited his adopted city, and would later provide a contrast to Ali’s finesse. He made the 1964 Tokyo Olympics as an alternate after another American boxer was injured, keeping to himself in the Olympic Village and focusing on training. Improbably, he kept winning his bouts. In the heavyweight semifinal, he broke his thumb, but he won that fight too, then hid the injury in order to compete in the final. He won the gold over the older, more experienced German fighter Hans Huber, only to be fired from his job in the slaughterhouse because his hand was in a cast.

It seems only natural in retrospect that Ali’s and Frazier’s lives would become intertwined: the dyslexic boy who found purpose—and a refuge from racism—in boxing, and the young sharecropper dropout who escaped his own inner-city blues in the ring; the would-be heirs of the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis. And for a time, they were friends. Ali would turn pro shortly after his Olympic coming-out party, and within four years, at the age of 22, he claimed a heavyweight title by beating Sonny Liston. The same year, he joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name. He cultivated both fame and infamy with his outspoken Black radicalism, and with his denunciations of the war in Vietnam. When he refused the draft in 1967, citing his faith, he was convicted for draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison, and then stripped of his boxing licenses, passport, and heavyweight title. Before public opinion turned against the war, Ali was likely the most despised man in America. In the boxing world, Frazier was among the few people who didn’t cut ties.

[Read: When Muhammad Ali refused to go to Vietnam]

Frazier had come up in Ali’s shadow. With Ali no longer eclipsing him, his career took off. In 1968, he fought Buster Mathis for the New York State Athletic Commission’s heavyweight title, one component of the unified world heavyweight title. After the fight, a reporter asked, slyly, if Frazier considered himself a champion. According to the New York Daily News, Frazier glowered.

The promoter Butch Lewis later said that when the two met, Frazier continued to call Ali “champ,” even after taking part of his title. Ali moved to Philadelphia while waiting for his appeal to work its way through federal courts, and the two often crossed paths. In an interview he gave later in his life, Frazier would say that Ali popped into Frazier’s gym to talk about their inevitable fight, and asked Frazier for help with getting his license back. Frazier said he obliged. In 2011, many obituaries of Frazier mentioned that he said he’d lobbied President Nixon for Ali’s reinstatement.

During his time away from boxing, which would end up lasting some three years, Ali supported himself with speaking engagements and appearance fees. According to Frazier, Ali liked to characterize the duo as generals in two different theaters. “Just keep whuppin’ those guys in the ring and I’ll keep fighting Uncle Sam. And one day we’ll make a lot of money together,” he told Frazier. Ali decided to write an autobiography, The Greatest. In it, he said he admired Frazier. “Of all the people in my profession I would like to have had as a friend,” Ali wrote, “he was the one.”

On a summer day in 1970, according to that book, when the two men both had appointments in New York City, Frazier, flush from his earnings as the newly crowned heavyweight champion, picked Ali up in Philadelphia in his gold Cadillac and drove him to New York. Frazier told Ali about his aspirations as a soul singer, and Ali sang a ditty he’d composed, “Mighty Whitey.” They talked about race in America, and Frazier told Ali about having to fight his way through the Jim Crow Deep South.

Sitting side by side, the two often returned to rhapsodizing about how their future fight might play out. There was no shortage of playful insults, but Ali told Frazier in earnest that with his fighting income dried up, he needed a job. He wanted to be Frazier’s sparring partner, and asked for money. Near the end of their trip, Frazier loaned Ali a hundred bucks. He let the top down on the gold Cadillac and they cruised. But when it came time for Frazier to drop off Ali, the men agreed that they shouldn’t be seen as friendly in public. Nobody pays to see two friends fighting.

Shortly after the sixth round began in Manila, the dynamite in Frazier’s left hand finally exploded. He connected with a thunderous hook, stretching his arm and body as far as he could reach to snap Ali’s head back. A few seconds later, Frazier hit him again with the same punch. Ali stumbled, throwing a feeble, off-balance uppercut to the space where Frazier had just stood. The crowd, which had favored Frazier—for his Christian faith, it was said, and out of a national affinity for underdogs—erupted in cheers. Now it was Frazier who jogged and Ali who lumbered. Three more times in the round, Frazier’s left found Ali’s face cleanly. For the first time in the match, Frazier was the clear winner of a round.

But after his exile from boxing, Ali had discovered something useful, and something terrible. Stripped of the preternatural speed of his prime, he realized, quite simply, that he could sustain more damage than most fighters could deliver. In the seventh round, Ali shook off the punishment and for a time found some of his younger self, beginning to dance in the middle of the ring again. Frazier kept pounding Ali’s body. But now, as Frazier advanced, Ali peppered his face with starch-stiff jabs and two-punch counters. His fist kept finding Frazier’s right eye.

The genesis of the Frazier-Ali feud all depends on who’s telling the story. Long after Frazier’s retirement from boxing, after his hatred of Ali had solidified into a defining part of his life, he denied in his autobiography that they’d ever really been friends. And The Greatest, Ali’s autobiography written with Richard Durham, a renowned Black journalist and former editor of a newspaper for the Nation of Islam, may not be entirely reliable in its characterization of Ali’s sentiments. It was published in 1975, just two months after the Manila fight, with a mandate from Ali’s handlers to scrub unsavory elements of his life. It’s possible that the book’s praise for Frazier was a real-time revision of the ugliness Ali had recently unleashed in the Philippines.

But the balance of the evidence suggests that the two men did share a bond. Frazier had looked up to Ali, and is said to have asked for his autograph when they’d first met, hoping they would one day fight. The question of when that might happen was postponed for a long time as Ali appealed his case. A match planned in Florida fell through, and rumors of bouts in Mississippi, Canada, and Australia never materialized.

Ali had always made a habit of taunting his opponents, many of whom took it as funny and gave back as good as they got. That’s boxing. But over the course of his exile, Ali’s barbs and stunts against Frazier grew into something more venomous.

During his sojourn in Philadelphia, Ali constantly challenged Frazier to unsanctioned fights. On a September day in 1969, he showed up at the Police Athletic League gym, demanding a fight with Frazier right there. According to a local report, more than 1,000 people who’d gotten wind of the challenge also arrived, and police soon broke up the crowd. Outside, Ali stood on top of a car and stoked the nascent mob, promising them a fight at a rec center a few miles away. He led a mass of people across the city to the supposed fight location, where as many as 10,000 people eventually gathered. Ali urged them to form a ring, and led them in chants calling out Frazier, who never showed.

These spectacles might have all been excused as Ali doing what he did best: promoting. But ultimately, there was never room enough, in town or in boxing, for both men. It was not a given that Ali would ever fight again; that he could avoid jail time and be vindicated; that he’d reclaim the title. And all the while, Ali felt that Frazier was a counterfeit champ who wasn’t his equal in the ring, the face of all that had been taken from him. In the other corner, Frazier constantly had to prove himself as a deserving victor, even though his style and persona never quite captured audiences the way Ali’s did. And years of continual needling is apt to get under anyone’s skin.

The growing fissure became a permanent rift when one day Frazier heard Ali doing a radio interview. Ali boasted about how easily he would beat Frazier, calling him a coward, as he’d often done. But this time, Ali added something new: He called Frazier an Uncle Tom.

After repeated provocations, Frazier grew so incensed that he drove to Ali’s residence, where Ali began a frustrating game he would play with Frazier for the rest of their lives. He insisted that he hadn’t meant anything by the insults, that he was just trying to gin up attention for their eventual fight. Frazier was being too sensitive, he said; he needed to loosen up. But Frazier wasn’t having it. He’d told Ali about how he’d had to scrap with racists who meant him physical harm just to make it out of the South. Being called an Uncle Tom was a betrayal.

They finally fought in 1971, at Madison Square Garden, a few months before the Supreme Court ruled that Ali had been improperly denied status as a conscientious objector and overturned his conviction for draft dodging. The “Fight of the Century,” as it was dubbed, was marked as much by personal animosity as by the unique excitement of having—by virtue of Ali’s forced hiatus—two undefeated champions face off in a title fight. In the months before the $5 million match, Ali turned up the invective, calling Frazier dumb, mocking his dark skin, and painting him as a lackey for his white handlers.

Frazier didn’t hide his anger, raging in prefight interviews about how badly he would hurt Ali. He’d never called Ali by his chosen name, but now Frazier’s insistence on calling him Clay was tied to a larger rejection of the Nation of Islam, and his contention that the group was using Ali.

Ali countered, saying that Frazier was himself being used by his management group, a collection of white businessmen in Philadelphia. He said that rooting for Frazier made a Black person a traitor, and that Frazier fought for Nixon. (According to a member of Frazier’s entourage, Dave Wolf, Ali also said that Frazier fought for Klansmen.) As a result, Frazier received anonymous death threats, and his children feared for his life. Winning the fight would not be enough for Ali; he evidently needed to erase the idea of Frazier as an equal, both in and out of the ring.

The “Fight of the Century” lived up to the billing. Ali came out aggressively, with rapid-fire punches in the first few rounds. But he was slower than he’d been before his hiatus, and as he got tired, Frazier’s constant, precise body work took hold. Frazier was more John Henry than Joe Louis, driving steel over and over again into the core of his opponent. The fight went the distance, a full 15 rounds, but the outcome was clear. In the 11th, Frazier uncorked a left hook that made Ali wobble. In the 15th, he delivered another that knocked Ali down.

The scorecards were unanimous, although Ali and his team disputed the decision and demanded another fight. After the match, Frazier said that he’d reached back home to “the country” for some of the blows he’d landed. In a match that was, in a sense, a referendum on Frazier’s Blackness, the arm that had been permanently marked by Jim Crow had forced a judgment.

By the tenth round in Manila, Ali and Frazier both knew that this fight would take something from them, something they hadn’t had to give before. Sweat poured off them, and between rounds they sank onto their stools and gasped. This was a test of endurance, against each other and against the hellish conditions in the ring.

A beleaguered Ali had gained momentum in the eighth, launching a barrage of punches that momentarily hurt Frazier, and began to swell his face. But Frazier was inexorable. He kept Ali on his back foot, driving him into the corners and delivering vicious shots to the head, blows that—had they been delivered by a slightly younger Frazier—might have knocked men out cold. Ali shook it all off. He was a blanket, still trying to clinch Frazier and hold him down. The two boxers teetered against each other, exhausted, until Padilla stepped in again, pulling Ali’s gloves off the back of Frazier’s neck. They raised their arms, almost unwillingly, and resumed slugging.

When Carlos Padilla Jr. had woken up on the morning of the Ali-Frazier match, he was not the chosen referee. Amid all the acrimony between the Ali and Frazier camps, they hadn’t agreed on who would stand in the ring between the two men. Their second fight, in which Ali had thoroughly avenged his defeat in the “Fight of the Century,” had been marred by controversy over the officiating. That bout, also held in Madison Square Garden, was less a boxing match than a hugging match. According to Frazier’s trainer, Eddie Futch, Ali had clinched more than 100 times, often pulling Frazier’s neck down in order to tire him. Both corners had criticized the referee, Tony Perez—Frazier’s side for not stopping the clinching, and Ali’s for a key moment in which Perez had accidentally ended a round too soon, after Ali had stunned Frazier with a right hand and might have been able to go for a knockout. Even on the eve of the fight, Ali’s and Frazier’s teams and the boxing authorities could not agree on which of the candidates who’d been brought to Manila would be in the ring.

Ed Kolenovsky / AP

The referee Carlos Padilla Jr. during the Thrilla in Manila. He had never officiated a fight above the 135-pound weight class before.

There was a uniquely Marcosian way of breaking the deadlock. According to Izenberg, when the parties met that night to finally settle the issue, one of the omnipresent Filipino military men placed a .45-caliber pistol on the bargaining table between the two sides and suggested that the referee be Filipino. The leading candidate was Padilla. At dawn on the day of the fight, the commission called Padilla’s home to let him know he’d be the referee. But he had already left for the Coliseum to report for the undercard fights. After he arrived, he told me recently, an official said to get a move on; reporters were waiting for him. Confused, Padilla asked why. “Don’t you know you’re going to referee the Ali-Frazier fight?” was the answer.

He had never refereed a fight above the 135-pound weight class, and most of his experience had come in amateur gyms and converted cockfighting rings, which were small compared with a regulation heavyweight ring. “I said, ‘Goddamn, it’s big!’” Padilla recalled. He’d never had to give instructions to fighters in English, and his English wasn’t so great. Trying to separate two 200-plus-pound men would be difficult for anybody, and at 5 foot 8, Padilla was diminutive next to Ali and Frazier.

I met Padilla at his home in Las Vegas, not far from Izenberg’s. He’s 91, still spry, and still wearing the same thick mustache that made him stand out in the ring. Padilla is fiery and prone to a “goddamn,” a favorite expression. He was eager to show me a Facebook video, taken the year before, of him working a speed bag, sending it flying with a steady rhythm until it became a blur.

We talked in his living room, which was crowded with photographs and Catholic figurines. On the wall and in frames propped up behind me were pictures of Padilla’s refereeing career, and of boxers who’d been in his orbit. In the middle were the highlights: photographs of Ali and Frazier squaring up in Manila, with Padilla looking on.

Long before that fight, boxing had been a prominent part of life in the Philippines. After America seized control of the archipelago from Spain in 1898, then brutally suppressed Indigenous rebellions, it exported American culture in the name of “civilization”—part of the “white man’s burden,” as Rudyard Kipling put it in 1899. As was true of colonialism’s other exports, the intended subjects quickly made the art of boxing their own, subverting the original intentions. The legendary Pancho Villa won the world flyweight championship in 1923. In the 1960s, Gabriel “Flash” Elorde held the world super-featherweight title for seven years. Also trained in eskrima, the national martial art of the Philippines, Elorde embraced a boxing style—of “dancing” and maintaining distance while landing quick strikes—that influenced a young Muhammad Ali. When Ali floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee, he was likely channeling Elorde.

Padilla happily recounts his role in all of this history to anyone who’ll listen. The morning of the match, he was nervous: He had never officiated anything with anywhere close to this level of attention. Then again, nobody had. The fight was held at 10 a.m. local time, in order to accommodate an expected global audience of hundreds of millions; it was likely one of the most-watched television events in history at that point. Many people who watched the match live paid to do so in movie theaters or arenas equipped with closed-circuit projectors. But nearly half a million viewers in the United States watched it live via satellite on a new network, HBO.

If Padilla got anything wrong, the error would be indelible. Just about every person in the Philippines would be watching. Hundreds had traveled to Manila just to be close to the action, even if they couldn’t get into the arena. “They slept around the outside of the Coliseum,” Padilla told me. “For boxing, Filipinos pause everything in life,” Jay Gonzalez, a Manila-born boxing coach and academic, told me. He was 11 years old in 1975, and watched the fight in class on a television his teacher rolled in. He and his classmates were excited to watch two Black champions, feeling an affinity as people of color. It didn’t hurt that the referee was Filipino.

Padilla endeavored to make his mark early. With the Marcoses looking on—seated in high-backed thrones that Padilla believes were bulletproofed to foil assassination attempts—he barked at both fighters, trying to project authority. It was almost unheard-of for a referee to disqualify a fighter in a heavyweight championship, and Filipino officials warned Padilla not to make history. But he was never demure. He told Ali that he would penalize him for illegal holds, and gave a warning to Frazier early on for a low blow. Padilla kept the fight brisk, a welcome change from the wrestling match that had transpired during the previous Ali-Frazier fight.

Lawrence Schiller / Polaris Communications / Getty

Most agree that Ali won the beginning of the fight in Manila and dominated the end, but that Frazier owned the middle.

Ali couldn’t have known that Frazier was fighting one-eyed—that he had been fighting one-eyed for years, having lost most of his sight on his left side because of a cataract. He had made it past physicals by memorizing eye-test charts and tricking fight doctors, just as he’d shrugged off other injuries and ailments that would have sidelined other men. But now his right eye—the good one—was failing him.

After taking Frazier’s punishment to his body and skull for the better part of 10 rounds, Ali started landing power punches more frequently around Frazier’s face and right eye. Inflammation on each side of the socket met in the middle and began to shut it.

In the 13th round, with the eye swelling and bleeding, and with blood pouring from his mouth, an exhausted Frazier willed himself out of his corner, throwing blows that even a gassed Ali could avoid or ignore. Frazier could not see clearly, and his entire head seemed swollen, and Ali kept landing punches. He knocked Frazier’s mouthpiece into the crowd, but somehow, miraculously, Frazier still stood.

On a sweltering April night, I hailed a GrabCar and sped from the Manila airport to my hotel in Quezon City, one of the cities that make up the megalopolis of greater Manila and the site of the Ali-Frazier fight. Everywhere I looked, armed security guards crowded street corners and building entrances. The country’s midterm elections were approaching, and violence around elections was not uncommon. Still, as guards and a bomb-sniffing dog checked the trunk for explosives outside my hotel, I sensed a bit of theater in all the security. The legitimacy of the government, now led by Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., the son of the two famed kleptocrats, still seems to rely on the appearance of safety more than anything else.

The next morning, I ducked into the cool refuge of the Araneta Coliseum, which had been temporarily renamed the Philippine Coliseum in 1975 before it hosted Ali-Frazier III. The white-domed arena, now gray with age and grime, didn’t resemble its namesake so much as a spaceship, a Starship Enterprise plopped amid high-rises. Inside, the place that had been so hot as to be nearly unbearable on that morning 50 years ago was mostly empty, and the air-conditioning was cranked high enough to give me goose bumps. If I was looking for traces of Ali and Frazier, they might have been covered from my view: The venue was being prepared for a live show by performers from RuPaul’s Drag Race the following night.

I left the Coliseum and walked around the corner to Ali Mall—built in honor of its namesake in 1976—and then to Gateway Tower, where I met Jorge Araneta, the leader of the empire that had built the Coliseum and the business district around it. He was 89 years old, still svelte and sharp in a patterned blue resort shirt, and still wearing the easy, confident air of authority. We sat at a round wooden table in his office and he picked up a stack of photo albums, all filled with snapshots taken during Ali’s time in the Philippines. Araneta found a picture of two smiling men attending the dedication ceremony of the mall I had just visited. One was quite obviously Muhammad Ali. It took me a moment to place the young face of Araneta himself.

The Araneta clan had grown prosperous as sugar planters during Spanish rule, he told me. After their home was destroyed during World War II, his father took a trip to Rome and, upon seeing the Colosseum, had a spark of inspiration. “He said: ‘I’m going to build the same,’” Araneta told me.

At the time of its completion, in 1960, the Araneta Coliseum was the largest building of its kind in the world. Its inaugural event was the super-featherweight title fight between Flash Elorde and Harold Gomes, when Elorde became the first Filipino in decades to capture a title.

When Marcos declared martial law in 1972, the elder Araneta, a prominent backer of the opposing Liberal Party, fled to New York. Jorge stayed behind and ran the business. When Marcos’s regime needed a venue for what would be the biggest sporting event in the history of the Philippines, there was just one real choice. The regime’s sole imposition was the temporary renaming of the building. In his office, Araneta laughed. “At least they gave it back,” he said. “Some people would have kept it.”

The Coliseum today has hosted everything from Boyz II Men concerts to the Miss World Philippines pageant, but it still carries a special association with combat sports: boxing, kickboxing, mixed martial arts. The Filipino boxing legend Manny Pacquiao, who recently returned to the ring after a four-year retirement, is planning an event commemorating Ali-Frazier at the Coliseum, fueling speculation that he might himself fight there. The arena is also home to an annual tournament billed as “the biggest cockfighting event in the world.” Blood still regularly stains the floors of the Coliseum’s rings.

This is a fulfillment of the elder Araneta’s vision. Inside the first Colosseum, the masses of Rome watched slaves and animals butcher one another. Brutality, coercion, and terror were always elemental parts of the entertainment. But there were also moments of transcendence mixed in with the gore—the beauty and creativity of martial arts, the thrill of the contest, the inquiry into human limits and potential. And there was always the chance that some fighter might one day, through repeated victories, win freedom from the fight.

Perhaps the importance of the Ali-Frazier match derives from the extremity of those blood-sport contradictions. Ali—or Richard Durham channeling Ali—would write just months after the fight that some part of him had always rebelled against the primal allure of his sport. “Like in the old slave days on the plantations,” he wrote, “with two of us big black slaves fighting, almost on the verge of annihilating each other while the masters are smoking big cigars, screaming and urging us on, looking for the blood.” But he, the race man’s race man, had needed so badly to prove something in that ring that he’d tried to turn the entire Black community against someone he might otherwise call brother.

Frazier had needed to prove something too. In this, his last big bout, he had the opportunity to fight for a kind of freedom—freedom from torment and from constant comparison to his nemesis. But part of the reason the crowd was so rapt was the silent speculation—dreadful and giddy, and building in the final rounds—that he might face a gladiator’s end.

Frazier came out of his corner in the 14th all but blind, rocking on unsteady legs. A knot on his forehead was growing by the second, and his mouth and both eyes were badly swollen. Ali went forward stiffly, his trunk and hips deeply bruised from Frazier’s body blows. He seemed to struggle to lift his arms. Whatever well from which he’d drawn energy had gone dry.

Frazier couldn’t defend himself, but he kept throwing wild, delirious punches. A few left hooks landed, but they didn’t have much power anymore. Frazier kept tapping his own face, either to will himself on or simply to try to clear his limited vision. He almost entirely abandoned his guard. Ali threw wide, slow blows that arrived on Frazier’s skull by telegraph. It was like he was punching underwater. But the punches kept finding home.

When they went back to their corners, Futch, Frazier’s trainer, asked Frazier why he couldn’t avoid Ali’s winding punches. Frazier told Futch that he could no longer see Ali’s right hand. Frazier was determined to finish the fight. But Futch had seen boxers die in the ring. Against Frazier’s murderous protestations, he told Padilla to stop the fight.

After Padilla raised Ali’s arm and declared him the victor, the champion collapsed in a heap. The crowd roared, launching into chants of “Ali! Ali! Ali!” His team helped him push himself up to sit slumped on his stool, his arms dragging toward the floor as if his fists were too heavy to carry, his head bowed between his knees. When it came time to talk to reporters, Ali wobbled, barely able to steady himself or hoist the trophy. He told Izenberg that this was the closest to death he’d ever been. In his recap of the fight, Ali mostly eschewed his usual bravado: “I was surprised Joe had so much stamina,” he told a reporter. “He is the greatest fighter of all times, next to me.”

“Except for you,” the reporter replied.

“Except for me.”

As the referee, Padilla was one of the three people who submitted an official scorecard for the fight. All three had Ali up by a healthy amount going into the 15th round. Padilla said that even if Futch hadn’t told him to do so, he probably would have called the fight. “Because Frazier was no more.”

Neil Leifer / Sports Illustrated / Getty

After 14 rounds, Frazier’s trainer tells Padilla to stop the fight, and Ali retains his title as the heavyweight champion of the world.

The unofficial scorecards from journalists were more favorable to Frazier. The Associated Press scored the fight even going into the final round. The New York Times gave Frazier eight of the first 11 rounds. “Going into the 15th round, I had Ali ahead by one point,” Izenberg told me.

The general consensus is that Ali won the beginning of the fight and dominated the end, and that Frazier owned the middle. Frazier always maintained that Ali was too exhausted to fight the 15th, and that he could’ve won by a knockout if he’d just been allowed to fight.

After it was over, the Marcoses invited Ali to one of their many homes for the evening. They’d been pleased by the fight. In the Philippines, citizens rejoiced in it, and particularly in Padilla’s presence. “President Marcos wanted a showcase to the world,” Araneta told me. “What better show can you present than Muhammad Ali?” But the source of the regime’s good fortune sat in silence at dinner in the palace, seemingly unable to eat.

Araneta hosted Ali at his home for lunch shortly after the fight. “He was very somber” and could “hardly walk,” Araneta told me. “I wanted to uplift his spirits, and I said, ‘Muhammad, I’m going to name a building after you.’” That woke Ali up, he said. The next year, Ali would come back for the opening of Ali Mall.

The mall was one small testament to what Ali meant in Manila and in other corners of the subaltern world. He wasn’t all pageantry and promotion; people were genuinely inspired by his presence, his idealism, and his earned status as a symbol of resistance against empire. Even in the Philippines, where he dined with a butcher and entered the ring disfavored against Frazier, he is now revered—all part of the contradictions of the man. As President Barack Obama would say on the occasion of his death, Ali was “a name as familiar to the downtrodden in the slums of Southeast Asia and the villages of Africa as it was to cheering crowds in Madison Square Garden.”

Frazier didn’t attend the Marcoses’ after-party. He was too hurt to go, and probably too prideful. He sat in his dressing room, his face battered into a new shape. His son hugged him, and Frazier grumbled with his team about what might have been. “I was there, wasn’t I?” he said.

Ask anyone what makes a human human, and they’ll likely mention something to do with our brains. Maybe they’ll say we stand alone in our capacity for language, or reason, or self-awareness, not knowing that science has chipped away at each of these presumptions. We suspect now that whales can talk; that crows can reason; that octopuses may be self-aware. But one thing that seems to be truly unique to Homo sapiens is this: We are the only animal with fists.

Perhaps the fist evolved as an anatomical accident, a by-product of the lengthened fingers and opposable thumbs that gave humans their unparalleled tool-grabbing dexterity. That’s one theory. But compelling evidence suggests that the exact shape of the human fist evolved at least in part for punching. The theory would place the duality of human nature quite literally in our hands. On the one side, we have our instruments for the written word and our tools for daily diplomacy—for shaking hands or putting our palms up in peace. On the other side, we carry our most primal weapons.

In Jerry Izenberg’s home, there is a shrine to the human arsenal: a case holding a single, cherry-red boxing glove. On the thumb of the glove, Muhammad Ali’s famous, compact signature, scribbled in black marker. On the body of the glove, Frazier’s larger, swooping signature. The souvenir, which Izenberg thinks was signed after Frazier’s and Ali’s retirements, might suggest a thawing of relations between the men. But there’s some deception at play. According to Izenberg, the autograph seeker who’d first owned the glove had Ali sign first and then took it to Frazier, holding it so as to obscure Ali’s mark while Frazier signed.

In the waning years of Ali’s and Frazier’s lives, friends and media figures tried to patch things up between the rivals. But they never really reconciled, and both men’s lives were too abbreviated to let time do its healing. Like many of their peers in the pantheon of Black heavyweight boxing, they died relatively early, facing serious health and financial trouble.

Shuffling and diabetic, Frazier died broke in 2011, at the age of 67. As he had in Manila, Ali outlasted him, but again in Pyrrhic fashion. Parkinson’s disease hollowed him out in front of the world’s eyes, and he died at 74, in 2016, his own fortune having been diminished by friends and hangers-on.

[Read: The death of Muhammad Ali and the new definition of Parkinson's disease]

There had been promising statements and portents—charity matches and television appearances—that made it seem like Ali and Frazier might finally rekindle their friendship, but all were false starts. Invariably, Ali would renege on his apologies.

In 2000, when Izenberg was working on a 25th-anniversary retrospective for the Star-Ledger, he interviewed his friend Ali by phone. “And he said, ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t like me,’” Izenberg told me. “I said, ‘Yes, you do.’” He reminded Ali about Frazier’s children, who would come home from school crying when other kids teased them about their father being a gorilla or an Uncle Tom. “If Laila came home crying—‘Daddy, they think you’re a gorilla; you’re an animal’—how would you feel about that?” he asked Ali, referring to Ali’s daughter. Ali responded that he hadn’t meant to hurt Frazier’s family—again pleading that he hadn’t quite understood the impact of his own words.

Izenberg later called Frazier to relay Ali’s regrets. “Well, first of all, let him come and say that to me,” Frazier told him. It was something of a cruel jab toward Ali, who by that point struggled to get around on his own, and to speak. Frazier, despite his own infirmities, took pride in the idea that his blows in Manila had contributed to Ali’s Parkinson’s—or even caused it—going so far as to gloat about the possibility on the outgoing voicemail message for his cellphone. “But secondly,” he continued on the phone with Izenberg, “I ain’t accepting no apology. You hurt my boy, and that’s all there is to it.”

There’s a lifetime of what-ifs between the two signatures on the glove, of parallel realities where the two men did find common ground, and with it, a measure of peace. I envisioned how the glove might look if I squeezed it together, so that Ali’s and Frazier’s names finally found themselves side by side. But I realized that to do so would be to reconfigure the imaginary hand bearing the glove. It would disfigure the fist, our one uniquely human trait, and diminish that which makes us us.

This article appears in the October 2025 print edition with the headline “The Greatest Fight of All Time.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Floodlines Part IX: Rebirth

2025-08-01T08:00:00-04:00

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Five years ago, The Atlantic published Floodlines, an eight-part podcast that told the story of Hurricane Katrina and of the people in New Orleans who survived it. The show detailed the ways that failures of federal and local policies concerning flood control and levees created the flood that submerged New Orleans in 2005, and also the ways that preexisting social inequalities marked some people for disaster and spared others. Through the recollections of people who survived Katrina, as well as officials who tried to coordinate a response, Floodlines explored how misinformation, racism, and ineptitude shaped that response, and how Black and poor New Orleanians were pushed away from their homes. In particular, the series follows the story of Le-Ann Williams, who was 14 when the levees broke.

As the 20th anniversary of Katrina arrives, the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are still dealing with the legacy of the flood and with the racial inequality and displacement that were at the heart of the series. The Black population of New Orleans is declining, and some neighborhoods still haven’t come back. Many people who were forced to leave home in 2005 are unable to afford to rent or own where they built their pre-Katrina lives. Experts wonder if the flood-control system there is truly ready for the next “big one,” and because of climate change, more and more cities and towns may face similar threats. Help from FEMA is tenuous under a Trump administration that has slashed its resources and threatened to phase out the department altogether.

So on the occasion of this anniversary, Floodlines takes a fresh visit to New Orleans, to reconnect with Le-Ann Williams, and with her daughter, Destiny. In this special episode, we spend a day with Williams’s family and learn about the heartbreaks, tragedies, and triumphs they’ve experienced since we last spoke. We learn how trauma from Katrina lives on in the hearts and minds of its survivors, and how, for the generation born after the flood, a disaster they never witnessed still governs their lives.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Updated at 1:00 p.m. ET on August 6, 2025

Vann R. Newkirk II: (Knocks on metal door.)

Male voice: Who’s that?

Vann Newkirk: It’s Vann!

Male voice: Come on.

Newkirk: All right. (Chuckles.) How you doing?

Le-Ann Williams: Hey, Vann!

Newkirk: Hey, how you doing?

Williams: How y’all doing? All right.

Newkirk: Well, hey. It’s Vann Newkirk. I know it’s been a minute since you’ve heard from me here. Five years, to be exact.

Williams: My family: my mom, Patricia; my daughter, Destiny; and my cousin Tasha.

Newkirk: Nice to meet y’all. And I heard a lot about y’all. Nice to meet y’all.

Newkirk: A lot has happened in the time since we put out Floodlines. The pandemic started to really shut everything down the day we put out the show, and it’s been one thing after another since then. There’s been economic chaos. There were elections. There was an insurrection. There’ve been fires and hurricanes and floods. There’s been a lot of death and a whole lot of grief. A lot of people live different lives than they did in 2020. Hell, I know I do.

Five years ago, when I was making Floodlines, I’d been thinking about Richard, the enslaved man who survived the hurricane in 1856 at Last Island, Louisiana.

Newkirk (Floodlines clip): The next morning, the only building still standing on Last Island was that stable. Richard and the old horse had made it. Many other folks weren’t so lucky.

Newkirk: I was interested in memory and what disasters reveal about a place. My reporting took me to New Orleans where I was introduced to somebody who, quite frankly, changed my life.

Williams (Floodlines clip): We’ll have the trumpet player, the trombone player, the snare-drum player, the bass-drum player, and the tuba players will have sticks blowing.

Newkirk: Le-Ann Williams. You remember Le-Ann. She was 14 years old.

Williams (Floodlines clip): I had this crush on this boy named Fonso Jones—

Newkirk: She grew up around Treme and Dumaine Street—

Williams (Floodlines clip): —and Fonso was the point guard.

Newkirk: —living in the Lafitte housing projects, when Hurricane Katrina came and the levees broke.

Williams (Floodlines clip): And we heard it on the radio, and a man was like, he was in a panic: I repeat, get to safety; get to the Superdome.

Newkirk: She and her family went on an odyssey after the flood. And she came back to a totally different city.

Archival (Floodlines clip): 3,000 people a day heading to Texas.

Archival (Floodlines clip): Arkansas will take 20,000 people.

Archival (Floodlines clip): I’m not going back to New Orleans. I don’t wanna go back to New Orleans.

Williams (Floodlines clip): If you push us out, what’s gonna be left? Just come look at things, like a museum. Just come and looking at historic places and buildings? That’s it? If you push us out, where the culture gonna come from?

Newkirk: If you haven’t listened to Floodlines, I recommend starting from the beginning. In 2020, when we put the show out, I honestly didn’t know if it would matter that much with so much going on. But I found out that I was wrong.

Archival (news clip): The breaking news: Stay at home. That is the order tonight from four state governors as the coronavirus pandemic spreads. New York, California, Illinois—

Newkirk: Whether it was the early fears of “looting” during the pandemic, or a Black community being destroyed by a fire—

Archival (news clip): Altadena, and this entire hillside is on fire.

Newkirk: —or FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene—

Archival (news clip): The deadliest hurricane for the U.S. since Katrina in 2005.

Newkirk: —people kept coming back to Hurricane Katrina as a point of reference.

Russell Honoré: That’s rumor gets spread. You know, we dealt with that in Katrina too, Laura.

Newkirk: As it turned out, this show about generations of New Orleanians contending with catastrophe, grief, memory, displacement, and being left behind by our government still had some important lessons for the present. In 2020 we left the show’s narrative unfinished, on purpose. Le-Ann, and the others we met—Fred, and Alice, and Sandy, and General Honoré—were all still living with the legacy of Katrina and making meaning from it themselves. They were still living their stories.

But also, as it turns out, I couldn’t quit Floodlines so easily. I’d become connected to the people I’d interviewed, who’d shared their lives with me. I’d spent hours and days talking to them, eating meals with them, hanging out. I cared about what happened to them.

Before, I had been thinking about Richard, but now I was thinking about Le-Ann. After the show came out, I saw that she’d gone through even more tough times. I also saw that she was celebrating: a new home, a new job, a kid who was doing well in school.

So on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Katrina, I decided to visit New Orleans.

Williams: Oh, Lord.

Destiny Richardson: We’re gonna tear you up in them spades.

Williams: Look at her. We gonna tear him up?

Richardson: Mm-hmm.

Williams: We’re gonna tear you in them spades.

Newkirk: I don’t know. I ain’t lost in a minute. (Laughs.)

Newkirk: I paid Le-Ann a visit, and talked to her family. And met her daughter, Destiny, for the first time.

Newkirk: When we last spoke, you were what? Eleven?

Williams: Yeah.

Newkirk: Eleven years old, and Le-Ann told us a whole lot about you, so, and she posts about you on Facebook all the time.

Williams: Look what you do.

Richardson: Always.

Newkirk: Always. I’ve seen the honor roll. (Laughs.) You got the honor roll.

Richardson: Yup, honor roll every year.

Newkirk: Congratulations.

Richardson: Two times in a row.

Newkirk: Congratulations.

Richardson: Thank you.

Williams: I’m a proud parent, of course.

Newkirk: Catch me up; catch me up. What’s been going on with you the last five years?

Williams: I changed jobs; I moved. I’m in a different spot. And I’m in a different place than I was five years ago.

Newkirk: What kind of place?

Williams: I’m at a peace state, like letting things go that don’t mean me no good, you know, I’m trying to just go a different route.

Newkirk: I wanted to know more about that different route. So I stayed a little while.

[Music]

Newkirk: From The Atlantic, this is a special episode of Floodlines, “Part IX: Rebirth.”

It’s Sunday, after church time, when we meet Le-Ann. We’re trying to hurry up and talk so we can get back across town to catch a second line before it rains. We’re in Le-Ann’s new home, and the living room is full of family, everybody just shooting the breeze. She rents here and lives with her mother, Patricia, and with Destiny. It’s a quiet street.

Newkirk: What’s this neighborhood we in?

Williams: We in Pontchartrain Park.

Newkirk: Pontchartrain Park. It’s a historic neighborhood.

Williams: Yes, it is.

Newkirk: So last time we met you were out in the East.

Newkirk: Back then, in 2020, Le-Ann lived in a smaller place off a busy road in New Orleans East. She was working around the clock to provide for Destiny. It was far from the part of the city where she’d grown up, and she told us then how much she resented being forced away from the only home she’d known.

New Orleans East was a tough place to live. After the floodwaters receded, it became sort of a holding area for people pushed out from the core of the city by rising rents and gentrification. When Le-Ann was living there, it was known for crime, violence, for food deserts, for pollution, for all the things you don’t want when you’re raising a little girl.

Williams: I just feel like we just was forgotten about, pushed into different neighborhoods. And yeah, the East is dangerous—it’s dangerous out there. Don’t pump gas at night. If you’re on E, you just try and make it home on E. (Laughs.) And a lot of crime is happening now, especially with our youth.

When I was a kid, you could easily go to the gym, get on the swimming team, the double-dutch team, anything. They don’t even have activities like that no more, so it’s easy for the youth to get into things and get in trouble. There’s a lot of carjacking. They’re doing that now—for fun.

Newkirk: The East had felt like a magnet for tragedy. And sure enough, in 2023, when Destiny was around the same age Le-Ann had been during Katrina, catastrophe struck again. But this time, it was a more personal kind of storm. Le-Ann’s stepfather, Jeffrey Hills, the man who’d helped raise her and who’d tried to protect her during Katrina, died suddenly in his sleep, at the age of 47. Talking there in Le-Ann’s living room, the loss still felt recent and present.

Williams: That was two years ago.

Newkirk: People say that’s a long time, but that’s not a long time.

Williams: That’s not.

Newkirk: Yeah. How you dealing with it now?

Williams: Better than two years ago, you know? But we still take it day by day.

Newkirk: The room got a little quieter. Everyone was still grieving. Patricia, Le-Ann’s mom, had lost her husband and partner: for Le-Ann, a father in everything but blood. Jeffrey was smart and he loved books, and he’d always taken pride in her academics. Destiny was his only grandchild, and you know he spoiled her.

But Jeffrey wasn’t just a cornerstone of the family. He was a special part of the whole community. If you were in New Orleans, you knew Jeffrey. He was a veteran tuba player in the city, and he’d played with basically all the big brass bands. He taught and mentored young musicians. I’d seen him play before I even met Le-Ann. His name gets mentioned with all the legends who’ve come through here. And just like it had been for them, for Tuba Fats and Kerwin James and all the rest, when he died, his comrades played in his honor.

[Music]

Newkirk: They played for days. And when it came time to put Jeffrey to rest, they threw a second line like you ain’t never seen. All back in the heart of the Sixth Ward, where Le-Ann used to live.

Williams: And when he had his funeral and everything, and it felt like the New Orleans before Katrina. His friends from the band, everybody, musicians, every musician we knew was there for him. And it was Jazz Fest time. A lot of people didn’t go to Jazz Fest; they came. He had gigs lined up for Jazz Fest and everything. So a lot of the musicians didn’t go to the Jazz Fest. They came there for his funeral. And my family all was together, everybody was laughing, and it just felt like the Treme area where I grew up in.

Newkirk: It was like a trip back in time. Back when cousins lived down the street and they used to play pitty-pat. It was bittersweet that it took death to bring back a little bit of the old magic.

But there would be more death before long—more people to grieve and more reasons to reminisce on the old days. The day after Jeffrey’s funeral, Le-Ann found out her brother Christian was gone too.

Williams: My brother was staying with me. He died—he got killed two blocks from my house as soon as he left from my house. He got his bike out the yard, and somebody killed him.

Newkirk: Now she had to grieve her stepfather and her brother, and to be a support for everyone else.

All the trauma of Katrina, all the moving and all the setbacks, all the big life changes like becoming a mother: It had all forced Le-Ann to grow up early. Christian’s and Jeffrey’s deaths were like a second growing-up.

For Le-Ann, what this all meant was that she would have to try to be the kind of cornerstone that Jeffrey had been. She felt like the family was being driven apart, and she wanted to do what she could to hold everything together.

Williams: You know, I’m grown, grown now—you know, people depending on me and things like that. I gotta make sure our family get together. (Laughs.)

Newkirk: Do you feel like it’s harder to keep up with people now that you’re spread out?

Williams: Yeah, it is. We probably, you know, say a thing or two on Facebook with each other.

Newkirk: On Sundays like this one, Le-Ann tries to get as many people in one place as she can, to eat and chat or watch Saints games. And during Mardi Gras season, she goes all in. The main event for the family is Endymion. It’s one of the biggest Mardi Gras parades, and every year thousands of people march. It’s a time.

Williams: I made a Facebook page: “Family is going to Endymion.” And we get on there, we say who’s bringing what, and what time, you know, who’s holding the spots down. And we all get together for Endymion every—since I was a kid. And you know, I just kind of keep the tradition going on for our kids.

Newkirk: For her kid. For Destiny.

Newkirk: I know she’s sitting right here, but can you tell us a little more about Destiny?

Williams: Oh my god. Destiny—she’s smart, she is kind, very headstrong. I have a good baby. I do. Beautiful.

Newkirk: She sound like you: smart, headstrong.

Patricia Hills: Yes.

Newkirk: Oh, you think so?

Newkirk: Le-Ann’s mom, Patricia, is there behind me.

Hills: Very smart. Yes.

Newkirk: Mm-hmm.

Hills: Very smart. Just like her mom, very smart.

Williams: Yeah, I’m proud of her. (Laughs.) I am. I’m a proud parent. Like, you know, you tell your child things, and you know it go in one ear and out the other sometimes. But when they actually listen and do what you say, that’s a blessing.

Newkirk: And we heard, you told us Destiny just got your first job, right?

Richardson: Yeah.

Newkirk: How long you been working there?

Richardson: Probably like, what, a month or two now?

Williams: About two months.

Richardson: About two months.

Newkirk: So what’s that, two, three paychecks so far?

Richardson: Yeah, I think so

Williams: Three paychecks.

Richardson: Yeah.

Newkirk: All right, how does that feel?

Richardson: Good. It feels good to have your own money (Laughs.) and buy your own self stuff. I like my job, though. It’s nice. It’s fun. And then you meet a lot of people from, like, all over the world, cause there is like a tourism mall.

Newkirk: In a lot of ways, Destiny is just like any other 16-year-old. She wants to get her license. She had a little marching-band drama. She’s spending those paychecks. She goes to the mall with her friends.

But she’s also dealing with things that would be hard for anyone, let alone a teenager. She’s coping with loss and has witnessed her fair share of violence. Aside from the get-togethers her mom organizes, she doesn’t always have the same closeness to family that Le-Ann did before the flood. It’s like there’s some ghost of Katrina that haunts parts of her life. It’s eerie to see that ghost whenever she watches the old footage in documentaries.

Newkirk: How do you think about Katrina? What’s the first thing that comes to mind?

Richardson: A disaster. It’s like when I watch it, sometimes it’ll be heartbreaking to watch it because you see the people like with their family, babies and all that. It’s hot, nobody to help them. You’re like, these people was really out here for days doing this, trying to get food, nobody coming to help them, water everywhere, clothes sticky. I don’t want to be like that after the hurricane. (Laughs.) It, it was just a lot. Like, a lot to take in, especially for the people I know. It was a lot for them. People dying.

Richardson: That’s a lot.

Newkirk: Well, you look at those documentaries and imagine your mama going through that?

Richardson: I could see her, she’s (Laughs.)—I could just see her scared, nerves bad. She already nerve-racking, now, (Laughs.) so I could just see her (Laughs.) when a hurricane hit there after. Probably worrying my grandma, worrying everybody in the house.

Hills: Yes, yes.

Newkirk: Naturally, Destiny doesn’t have the same fears and anxieties that Le-Ann has. She likes to poke fun at her mother for being skittish whenever a storm comes around. But Le-Ann says she’s learned her lesson. She’s evacuating every time. It doesn’t matter how much Destiny jokes about it.

Richardson: She’ll leave even if it’s a one-category storm—hurricane. She’d be so scared: We leaving, let’s go, we leaving. We ain’t waiting to see if it gets stronger or not. We leaving.

Williams: But she never experienced something like that before, and she never will, because we’re leaving.

Richardson: She leaving. She says she sure won’t go through nothing like that again.

Williams: I don’t care what! No, indeed, I have a child, so I know how my mom and them felt.

Hills: You know, I just remember my baby being scared.

Newkirk: Le-Ann and Patricia walked through the floodwaters together. They have a shared story, and shared memories that I’d heard before, from Le-Ann. Now, hearing things from Patricia’s point of view, as a parent myself, helped me really understand just how agonizing it all was.

Hills: She was the oldest and she got the most experiences, and she knew about it and she was scared and stuff like that.

Williams: Yes indeed.

Hills: When Hurricane Katrina hit and I just remember my baby being scared and asking if Momma, we going to die? And I said, No, we’re not. Honey, I said, God got us. We gonna get outta here.

Newkirk: In that moment, Le-Ann had come to understand just how vulnerable she was. It wasn’t just the storm or the flood. The city and the federal government had turned their backs on her. It all left a mark.

Williams: I said, They gonna leave us here to die. They don’t care. I, I said, I hear stories about, oh, you, you know, Black and this and that and poor communities and you know, these things I hear about, but they actually go through something and live it—that’s something different. Like, Nobody’s coming to save us? I mean, newborn babies out there, they have dead bodies just laying—older folks can’t take it. They just dropping. I’m like, My God, this is real.

Newkirk: And so you said, Never again to that.

Williams: I’m not taking—she’s not going through that. She’s not. Now, just in her mind to worry about something like that, so young, to worry if she’s gonna die or if somebody’s coming to save—no, she would never. Not if I have breath in my body. She’s not waiting on nobody to rescue her. I’m gonna be the one.

[Music]

Newkirk: When I last sat down with Le-Ann, way back in 2020, I played her tape from my interview with the ex–FEMA director Michael Brown.

Michael Brown (Floodlines clip): So you tell Le-Ann I’m sorry, but you tell Le-Ann that her responsibility is to understand the nature of the risk where she lives and to be prepared for it. Knowing that somebody’s not going to come—the shining knight in armor is not going to come and rescue her when that fear sets in.

Newkirk: It feels like Le-Ann’s response to that is to become the knight in shining armor for everyone else. To take care of people. To make sure that her daughter and her family never feel abandoned like she did. I asked her if she saw Destiny’s childhood as like an alternate-reality version of her own, one without that abandonment.

Newkirk: You were 14 when you had to leave the city. Destiny is 16. Do you see, maybe, in Destiny what that childhood could have been like without that disaster?

Williams: I think about it. I used to think about it a lot—like, where would I have ended up? Would my life, you know, still be the same? Or would I have went off to college like my daughter wants to do? But now I’m like, I’m where I’m supposed to be exactly. This is where God wants me to be, you know? I’m where I’m supposed to be today.

[Break]

Williams (Floodlines clip): It’s crazy. There’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be than here. I love it. It’s my home. It’s my home. I love New Orleans. I done been to Arizona, Texas, Mississippi after Katrina. Nothing like New Orleans. Nothing’s like New Orleans.

Newkirk: One of the things Le-Ann talks about a lot is how much she loves her new neighborhood. She says it’s safer, and her street is quiet and peaceful. And it’s a bit closer to where she grew up.

Newkirk: It’s better out here?

Williams: Yeah, it’s much better.

Newkirk: It’s pretty out here, and you got the levee right there. You was on the levees in the east, too, so you go up on both. (Laughs.) You still go up there with daiquiris or not?

Williams: (Laughs.) We have wine. We have wine.

Newkirk: You have wine? Okay, so it’s a classy establishment. We have wine.

Williams: Yes, wine. We have our wine nights.

Newkirk: Now Destiny’s the one who goes up to the levee most often, but to walk her mom’s dog, an adorable French bulldog named Frenchy.

Richardson: No, right here!

Newkirk: Right up there?

Richardson: Nah, right here.

Newkirk: I wanted to check it out, so we took a walk together. It’s not like the levee at the old place, where you could climb up and see into the water, which Le-Ann loved to do. But up here, maybe it’s best that the water is out of sight. The levees here overlook the Industrial Canal, where it meets the lake. It’s a critical point in the complex system of flood control that defines New Orleans. In 2005, certain parts of this very neighborhood stood under 15 feet of water after the levees were overtopped. There’s a new floodgate now, built by the good old Army Corps of Engineers, that’s supposed to stop that from happening again. Le-Ann is not so sure.

Williams: We’re sitting in a bowl. Mississippi, Pontchartrain—we’re just surrounded by water. We’re below sea level. So just imagine, the water’s on top of us, and the city’s just down here. The water sits like that, so that’s why we’re below sea level, so the wind is just going down. You can’t go up; you’re going down! So that’s the scary thing about, too, where we live. We’re below sea level. I told you that before.

Richardson: Yeah.

Williams: Like, I explained it.

Richardson: Now you see why I won’t stay down here? That’s another cue for me to go.

Williams: Keep moving, huh?

Newkirk: Destiny is kinda over it. She’s heard a lot about Katrina from her mother. When she was younger, Le-Ann even made her sit through a class she put together for Destiny and her friends.

Williams: Yeah, I had a classroom. I fed them every day. They had lunch and everything, breakfast. They had their lunchtime and then they had their time when their parents come pick them up.

Newkirk: So were you rolling your eyes?

Richardson: Was I?

Williams: And one day we had—they watched the documentary of Katrina and they had to write about it, like different things.

Richardson: Yes. My grandpa Jeffrey was in the documentary! Walking in the water with my auntie.

Williams: He was walking with auntie. He in there.

Newkirk: Even with all the teenage eye-rolling, you can tell Destiny is proud of her family’s story, especially of her grandfather. And that brought Le-Ann and Destiny back to talking about Jeffrey. About how much he meant to them, and how he represented what New Orleans used to be. They pulled up a video of his funeral and started reminiscing.

Williams: The band came in the funeral home.

Newkirk: Oh wow!

Williams: Look at how packed it was.

Richardson: It was so pretty.

Williams: My pastor say, I’ve never seen a celebration like this, my God! The band come in the funeral home?

Richardson: Yes, that was nice.

[Music]

Newkirk: Standing here in the grass, by the levees, the sun slipping behind a cloud, we watched together.

Richardson: They had so many people out there and so many people in the funeral home.

Williams: When they opened the door.

Richardson: When they open the door, that’s when you really saw the people. All the people wasn’t even in the funeral home.

Williams: Yes.

Richardson: They had beaucoup people standing outside.

Williams: He was well known—a tuba player.

Richardson: They had 11 tubas out there for him.

Newkirk: Oh, wow.

Newkirk: It seems to me like they weren’t just mourning Jeffrey, but also how they’d lived, and who they were. It got Le-Ann to thinking about her childhood in the Sixth Ward, and to telling Destiny stories she’d already heard 100 times.

Williams: We just did that. If my cousin had a tambourine, we’ll sit on a curb and they’ll just make a beat. And we’ll just start doing, like, little songs and stuff like that. That’s what we did with each other. We all say something.

Richardson: Y’all, it’s raining.

Newkirk: And then it started to rain.

Newkirk: We got to move.

Williams: Look at that. Oh Lord, we don’t want the sugar to melt, huh?

Newkirk: I got a gel in my hair. What you talking about?

Williams: Okay!

Newkirk: We split up, and dried out for a little bit. I put some more gel in my hair.

[Music]

Newkirk: In the evening, we met back up with Le-Ann and Destiny at an ice-cream parlor uptown.

Richardson: She’s getting a Creole Clown. He’s dressed up like a clown, the ice cream. I want to take a picture of him for the aesthetic.

Newkirk: Destiny did get that Creole Clown ice cream. For the aesthetic.

Newkirk: So they serve it upside down?

Richardson: And they got whipped cream.

Williams: Girl, he is too cute.

Richardson: Yes.

Newkirk: I thought it would be nice to end my time with Le-Ann and Destiny with an ice cream. Back during Katrina, when Le-Ann was escaping the flood, after she’d waded through rat-infested waters, cut her foot stepping on something sharp, and climbed up onto the baking-hot freeway, she saw a man with a cooler who handed her and her family ice creams.

Williams (Floodlines clip): He saying, Ice cream! Ice cream! It’s hot. I got ice cream, cold drinks, and water! Come on, baby. Get y’all something to drink, and, I know y’all, you know, thirsty and stuff.

Newkirk: She told us she got a strawberry shortcake.

Williams (Floodlines clip): A strawberry shortcake. You know? You ever had one of those? Yeah. It’s good. I got one of them.

Newkirk: The moment has always stuck with me as a symbol of how we misunderstand disaster and, by extension, what really happened during Katrina. There’s still, even today, a misconception that disasters—that this disaster in particular brought out the worst in people. That it exposed some latent savagery or lack of morals. But what I’ve seen, over and over again, is that Katrina really showed just how much people loved each other. How much they loved their communities and their city. What was exposed, though, was how little the country and that city loved them. It feels like, in her own way, Le-Ann is trying to rectify that.

Newkirk: Do you feel like you are like the heart of the family now?

Williams: Yes. And sometimes that get overwhelming. It does.

Newkirk: What do you do when you feel overwhelmed?

Williams: Pray. I pray a lot.

Newkirk: She’s overwhelmed a lot. Being the person everyone else relies on is hard, and it can feel like every single thing is on her shoulders. She’s doing her best to take up the role Jeffrey played, but now she understands how much of a toll that takes on a person.

Williams: It feel like I’m always responsible for everybody, like, everybody. And sometimes I’m like, Who responsible for Le-Ann? You know, having everybody’s back and making sure everybody’s good. And sometimes you’re like, you know, Who has my back?

Newkirk: But she also takes pride now in the fact that people around the city know her and know her story.

Newkirk: Do you feel like, you know, between us and all the other stuff, are you—would you call yourself an ambassador now for New Orleans, for the city?

Williams: Yes, I want to put my city on; I wanna, you know, bring light to my people, you know, in New Orleans, no matter what race you is or not, because we family down here, and I just want to bring attention to that.

[Music]

Newkirk: Le-Ann still believes in her city, and she wants to stake a new claim to it. She wants to own her own home in New Orleans. She’s working as a phlebotomist, and doing her best to support everybody and build up her credit.

Williams: It’s going to take a minute, but I’m going to do it.

Newkirk: So ideally, what’s your dream house look like?

Williams: Oh. Look, I think about it all the time when I just see houses. I’m like, Oh my God, I can’t wait to—especially to have something that, you know, that I got that I can probably leave my child. You know, something I can call my own. Me and Destiny, we right by the lake, we love looking at those houses. We just go through looking at houses, like Oh my God.

Richardson: We’ll be like, Ooh that pool big, their backyard big. That house so big!

Williams: Oh my God, this is living right here. We just, you know—

Newkirk: What color is your dream door?

Williams: I want to say red. (Laughs.)

Richardson: Red?

Williams: Old-school.

Richardson: Yes.

Newkirk: She wants a red door, just like her grandma’s house on Dumaine Street had.

Richardson: A big, big backyard.

Williams: We have to have a big backyard. Ooh, yes, indeed. My family is big—I got to have a big backyard.

Newkirk: Le-Ann wants to be able to leave Destiny something of her own in New Orleans. But Destiny is looking at colleges out of state.

Newkirk: So Destiny, if you leave, do you ever see yourself coming back?

Richardson: Probably not. I’ll probably come back for like, events and stuff—probably, like, Mardi Gras and all that. But as far as coming back to stay, no.

Newkirk: It’s the place where mother and daughter seem to differ most. Le-Ann was forced across the country, and then across the city, and has spent her whole life since trying to get back. Destiny wants to see the world for herself, to get out. She’s working hard in school, and she’s looking at colleges out of state. She’s got the grades to leave.

Newkirk: Have you taken any visits yet?

Richardson: No, I ain’t taken no visits yet. They be emailing me and stuff for visits, but I haven’t took no visits.

Williams: They gave her $500.

Richardson: Oh yeah, I had got one of CASE scholarships for Mercer. It’s at home in the envelope. Yeah, and if I go there, they’ll give me $2,000 more, plus the scholarship I’ve been built up on when I graduate.

Newkirk: You already getting scholarships?

Richardson: Yeah.

Newkirk: She’s saying it real low-key-like. All right.

Newkirk: But still, for as much as Destiny maybe wants to get out of New Orleans, she’s got her mother’s story with her. She might not know Katrina firsthand, but she knows the importance of taking care of people.

Newkirk: Anybody tell y’all y’all are pretty similar?

Richardson: Yeah, I hear that a lot.

Newkirk: (Laughs.)

Richardson: They say our personalities are similar.

Williams: My cousin tell me all the time, she was like, You’re hard on her, but she’s really strong minded. You don’t have to worry about her. Destiny knows her way. She was like, You need to give her more credit than what you’re doing because she, you know, she’s a good kid.

Newkirk: Do you—when people compare you to your mother, is that something where you roll your eyes?

Richardson: Yes, I be like, Oh my God. (Laughs.) They’d be, like, Aw, girl, you act just like your mama and how she acted when she was younger, but just a little bit more—better or something. I was like, Ah, girl. Here they go with this again.

Newkirk: Le-Ann wants to protect Destiny, and to give her the things she didn’t have. But I wonder if maybe she’s got it backwards. Maybe her family has the thing that other families, rich and poor, Black and white, need. Maybe they’ve got what other people are searching for. The things we lost in our own personal floods over the past five years: family, community, and connection. We lost memory; we lost time. What we need is care.

Newkirk: So how was the ice cream?

Richardson: That was good.

Williams: It was.

Richardson: I’m gonna most definitely get that again.

Newkirk: The clown, the clown was solid?

Richardson: Yeah, he’s still got his eyes and his hat.

Newkirk: Okay. If I could eat dairy, you know—

Richardson: You can’t eat dairy? You should’ve told me! I would have picked something else. (Laughs.)

Newkirk: No, this is fine. This is fine. Look, between the dairy and the shellfish, I come here and I fast.

Newkirk: We finished our ice creams and walked out into the summer. And then Le-Ann and Destiny went home.

[Music]

Floodlines is a production of The Atlantic. This episode was reported and produced by me and Jocelyn Frank. The executive producer of audio, and our editor, is Claudine Ebeid. Our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. Fact-check by Will Gordon.

Music by Chief Adjuah and Anthony Braxton.

Sound design, mix, and additional music by David Herman. Special thanks to Nancy DeVille.

You can support our work, and the work of all Atlantic journalists, when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

The Hollowness of This Juneteenth

2025-06-19T09:00:00-04:00

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Five years ago, as the streets ran hot and the body of George Floyd lay cold, optimistic commentators believed that America was on the verge of a breakthrough in its eternal deliberation over the humanity of Black people. For a brief moment, perhaps, it seemed as if the “whirlwinds of revolt,” as Martin Luther King Jr. once prophesied, had finally shaken the foundations of the nation. In 2021, in the midst of this “racial reckoning,” as it was often called, Congress passed legislation turning Juneteenth into “Juneteenth National Independence Day,” a federal holiday. Now we face the sober reality that our country might be further away from that promised land than it has been in decades.

Along with Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Juneteenth became one of three federal holidays with explicit roots in Black history. Memorial Day was made a national observance in 1868 to honor soldiers felled during the Civil War, and was preceded by local celebrations organized by newly freed Black residents. The impetus for MLK Day came about with King’s assassination exactly a century later, after which civil-rights groups and King’s closest associates campaigned for the named holiday. Memorial Day and Martin Luther King Jr. Day both originated in times when the Black freedom struggle faced its greatest challenges. Juneteenth—an emancipation celebration popularized during Reconstruction—was codified during what purported to be a transformation in America’s racial consciousness.

But, like its predecessors, Juneteenth joined the federal-holiday ranks just as Americans also decided en masse that they were done with all that. The 1870s saw the radical promise of Reconstruction give way to Jim Crow; the 1960s gave way to the nihilism and race-baiting of the Nixonian and Reaganite years. In 2024, the election of Donald Trump to a second term signaled a national retreat from racial egalitarianism. In his first months as president, he has moved the country in that direction more quickly than many imagined he would.

Trump has set fire to billions of dollars of contracts in the name of eliminating “DEI,” according to the White House. His legislative agenda threatens to strip federal health care and disaster aid for populations that are disproportionately Black. The Department of Defense has defenestrated Black veterans in death, removing their names from government websites and restoring the old names of bases that originally honored Confederate officers. The Federal Aviation Administration plans to spend millions of dollars to investigate whether recruiting Black air-traffic controllers (among other minority groups) has caused more plane crashes. The Smithsonian and its constituents have come under attack for daring to present artifacts about slavery and segregation. Books about Black history are being disappeared from schools and libraries. The secretary of education has suggested that public-school lessons about the truth of slavery and Jim Crow might themselves be illegal.

There were, perhaps, other possible outcomes after 2020, but they didn’t come to pass. The Democratic Party harnessed King’s whirlwinds of revolt to power its mighty machine, promising to transform America and prioritize racial justice. Corporations donned the mask of “wokeness”; people sent CashApp “reparations” and listened and learned. But the donations to racial-justice initiatives soon dried up. The party supported a war in Gaza that fundamentally undercut any claim to its moral authority, especially among many young Black folks who felt kinship with the Palestinians in their plight. When DEI emerged as a boogeyman on the far right, many corporate leaders and politicians started to slink away from previous commitments to equity. Democratic Party leadership underestimated the anti-anti-racism movement, and seemed to genuinely believe that earned racial progress would endure on its own. The backlash that anybody who’d studied history said would come came, and the country was unprepared.

Trump and his allies spend a lot of time talking about indoctrination and banning DEI. But by and large, the campaign against “wokeness” has always been a canard. The true quarries of Trump’s movement are the actual policies and structures that made progress possible. Affirmative action is done, and Black entrance rates at some selective schools have already plummeted. Our existing federal protections against discrimination in workplaces, housing, health care, and pollution are being peeled back layer by layer. The 1964 Civil Rights Act might be a dead letter, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act is in perpetual danger of losing the last of its teeth. The Fourteenth Amendment itself stands in tatters.

Five years after Democratic congresspeople knelt on the floor in kente cloth for nearly nine minutes, the holiday is all that really remains. This puts the oddness of today in stark relief. The purpose of Juneteenth was always a celebration of emancipation, of the Black community’s emergence out of our gloomy past. But it was also an implicit warning that what had been done could be done again. Now millions of schoolchildren will enjoy a holiday commemorating parts of our history that the federal government believes might be illegal to teach them about.

I once advocated for Juneteenth as a national holiday, on the grounds that the celebration would prompt more people to become familiar with the rich history of emancipation and Black folks’ agency in that. But, as it turns out, transforming Juneteenth into “Juneteenth National Independence Day” against the backdrop of the past few years of retrenchment simply creates another instance of hypocrisy. What we were promised was a reckoning, whatever that meant. What we got was a day off.

When the KKK Came to D.C.

2025-03-23T07:00:00-04:00

A century ago, in 1925, the Ku Klux Klan came to Washington, D.C. The Klansmen had arrived in early August: the Kleagles and Dragons and Exalted Cyclopes, regalia folded and packed, families in tow. Loyal men came from the South, as expected, but that was not where the group’s true strength lay. The Invisible Empire sent agents from all four corners, from New Jersey and Ohio and California and pretty much everywhere else.

An all-woman Klan band arrived from Cumberland, Maryland. A marching troupe paraded in from Fort Worth, Texas. Caravans of cars choked the highways heading into Washington, D.C., and specially chartered trains full of Klansmen spat out wave after wave of people into Union Station. Steamboats ferried groups up the Potomac from Virginia. The hordes of loyal Knights camped in Bethesda, Maryland, or at the crossroads of 15th and H Streets Northeast, in D.C., or across the river at the horse-show grounds. They crashed in boardinghouses and in hotels and with friends. In all, the members and their retinue numbered at least 30,000, not counting the horses.

They would march that weekend. There was talk that the New Jersey contingent had hired a plane that would fly a giant illuminated cross over the city, like a sign of some perverse providence. But as it turned out, that was just talk.

The Klan had been preparing for some time. The organization was not very tight-knit, and the planning was fractious. Hiram Wesley Evans—the group’s national leader, known as the Imperial Wizard—had originally discouraged the event, but he’d eventually relented to local members in D.C. He’d lived in Texas, where he’d personally overseen racial terror and violence. He’d been present in 1921 when Klansmen in Dallas abducted Alex Johnson, a Black bellhop, and flogged the man and branded his forehead with acid, after Johnson was allegedly found in a white woman’s hotel room.

But now, with the Klan reaching for a new level of national legitimacy, Evans found it useful for the group to avow a more moderate—or at least less overtly violent—platform. If the Klan was to march through the nation’s capital, it would request the proper permissions and allow police oversight. The D.C. march was supposed to be peaceful: no vulgarity, no fights, no brandings, no lynchings. The Klan wanted to appeal to American patriotism and dazzle onlookers with its showmanship—this was to be a pageant, not a pogrom.

Even so, many residents of D.C. were not so easily sold. The federal bureaucracy had become the beginnings of a multicultural haven, providing jobs that helped build a Black middle class and opening up roles to Jews and Catholics. This was a city whose architecture bore the handprints of slaves, and where cathedrals would soon dot the stunted skyscape. The city’s ethnic and religious minorities understood well that no matter how much the Klan polished its image, its swords still cut. Sales of guns in the District soared, and newspapers reported that “the negroes” were “arming and awaiting eventualities.”

Other groups appealed to President Calvin Coolidge to stop the march, but to no avail. Klan leaders in D.C. planned—perhaps hoped—for confrontation, and the city sent out its entire police force and mobilized Marines from Quantico. But on the day of the event, white reporters said they could barely find any spectators from the supposed lesser race and figured they were hiding. One Black newspaper told a different story, of Black people going about their day as normal, peering at the commotion with “amused contempt.”

The sky was heavy on the afternoon of the demonstration. Storm clouds were gathering. But the Klansmen carried on with confidence; the winds had been blowing in their favor for years. A decade prior, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation had become the country’s first blockbuster. The silent picture had enjoyed screenings right here in Washington, D.C., both for President Woodrow Wilson and for other members of government. The film’s portrayal of the Lost Cause myth and of heroic avenging Klansmen had helped re-create the KKK, which had mostly dissolved in the 1870s.

Hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of white Protestant men and women joined this new Klan in the following years, including Evans himself. Much of the country and the world was in a similar mood. The Red Summer of 1919, when anti-Black riots and massacres gripped dozens of cities, had come and gone, and the Black neighborhood of Greenwood, in Tulsa, had recently been burned. The Blackshirts paraded on Rome, and just a month before the Klan’s planned march, the first volume of a book called Mein Kampf began appearing on German bookshelves. The Scopes trial had just concluded; the Klan had been one of the early organizations calling for the inclusion of creationism in curricula.

Still, even up to the last minute, there were factional disputes about whether to go on with the D.C. parade at all. Perhaps, after having gotten there with little opposition, with city officials helping and thick crowds of white spectators appearing, the coming march somehow felt too easy for Klan leaders, for whom membership had always been a thing to hide, if only for appearances’ sake. Maybe there were some in the ranks of the Empire who’d expected to be shut down—a grievance to add to the list. But the weather held, and the road beckoned.

The triumph began at the Peace Monument, a marble complex built to honor men who’d served in the Union Navy during the Civil War. At its peak was an intricate white sculpture of a woman, referred to as Grief, crying on the shoulder of another, representing History. History held a tablet honoring the men who’d given their lives for the Union: “They died that their country might live.” Statues of Peace and Victory flanked the monument’s east and west faces, looking out to spaces where other features had been planned by the sculptors but never finished.

On the morning of the march, men who bore the inheritance of Nathan Bedford Forrest, one of the most notorious Confederates, gathered below the monument to prepare. A color guard of robed men riding atop black horses and carrying “a gorgeous American flag” struck out first, reportedly the first time anybody had ever preceded the police escort in a Pennsylvania Avenue parade, according to The Washington Post. As Evans would later remark, the Klan “always followed the flag.”

They followed the flag up Pennsylvania Avenue, the great road of democracy, in the direction of the White House. Side to side, covering the breadth of the avenue, men, women, and children marched, keeping their bared faces trained ahead. Many wore white hoods and robes, some with fringes and regalia colored brightly to mark various groups, orders, and ranks. Drummers and marshals helped them keep pace, and many Klans and auxiliaries put on special performances for the applauding crowd.

Some participants marched with military precision—some groups had dusted off actual kits from the Great War, and marched with their old comrades in arms. Groups of women and children marched. More than 100 attendees passed out from the sticky August heat, but the mood was otherwise exultant. The Klansmen sang hymns and marching songs. Behind men and banners that proclaimed white superiority, some bands played jazz.

Above all, according to the Post, “there was a profusion of flags.” According to The Baltimore Sun, there were 900 or so large flags, “the greatest number, perhaps, which were ever massed in a single spot.” Many marchers carried and waved small American flags, while new Klans and regiments were announced by larger flags, held high. Many units marched with flags that were so comically gigantic that they could not be waved, and had to be carried horizontally by teams of marchers. One group of women carried a flag that could cover the foundation of a good-size house today; spectators threw money on it, netting the flag-bearers some $200. There was to be no mistaking it: These were the most American of Americans. Under Evans, their platform, succinctly, was “Americanism.”

After about four hours, the march reached its end, under the stone obelisk dedicated to George Washington. Speakers held forth. The Grand Kleagle of the District of Columbia promised that the rain from the heavy clouds would not come; God had ordained it so. By the time A. H. Gulledge, an official orator for the Klan, took the stage, the ordination had evidently worn off. “This is the proudest day of my life,” Gulledge told the soaking crowd. “I never dreamed it would come so soon—a day when so many native-born, gentile, white Protestant American citizens might march down Pennsylvania Avenue unharmed and unmolested.” They had all come, Gulledge said, “to renew our pledge of allegiance to the greatest government man ever built,” a government that was finally allowing people like them their birthright freedom of speech.

Gulledge refuted any claims of “malice” or “hate” on the Klan’s part, saying that his group just wanted to put an end to the mixing of races—a phenomenon that had caused only strife and the disinheritance of white Protestants. In this, his words encapsulated part of the brewing philosophy of Evans. “We found our great cities and the control of much of our industry and commerce taken over by strangers, who stacked the cards of success and prosperity against us,” Evans would write in the North American Review the next year. “Shortly they came to dominate our government.” Evans was skeptical of the assimilability of Jews, Catholics, and recent immigrants, and believed that Black people were simply naturally inferior to their white betters.

Evans blamed Jews and Catholics for constantly criticizing that which was American. “Nothing is immune,” he wrote, “our great men, our historic struggles and sacrifices, our customs and personal traits, our ‘Puritan consciences’—all have been scarified without mercy. Yet the least criticism of these same vitriolic critics or of their people brings howls of ‘anti-Semitic’ or ‘anti-Catholic.’” For him, the way forward would be “Americanism”—for real Americans to proudly wear their real Americanness, to claim their dominion, to find their forgotten greatness.

The next evening, the organizers held a “Klan spiritual” and burned a towering cross in Arlington, but most of the visitors had already gone home. The marchers had made their way back to Union Station. Night trains sped home in the darkness. A group of white-robed boys helped direct traffic out of the city. Klansmen went back to their lives as policemen, doctors, teachers, dentists, carpenters, politicians.

When the next editions of newspapers arrived, many breathlessly covered the spectacle, estimating crowd sizes and marveling at the composure of the Klansmen. Black newspapers, however, played a different tune. According to The Washington Tribune, the march was huge but “unimpressive,” with “apathetic” spectators and little city enthusiasm. The Chicago Defender carried a brief blurb about the Klan’s “gala day,” but other events had pushed it below the fold: The front page centered the lynching of Walter Mitchell, a 33-year-old Black man in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, by a white mob. Mitchell had been falsely accused of accosting a young white woman, and the mob had rushed the jail, kidnapped him, paraded him through the streets, and hanged him from a tree. One headline was grim and sardonic: “Missouri Carries Out American Democracy.”

Related:

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

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A fishing boat passes icebergs that broke off from the Jakobshavn Glacier on March 5, 2025, in Ilulissat, Greenland. (Joe Raedle / Getty)

Take a look at the view from Greenland, a self-ruling Danish territory that has recently undergone a national election, seen protests seeking autonomy from Denmark, and become a prominent target of President Donald Trump’s.

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Solidarity and Gaza

2024-10-29T09:44:00-04:00

In April 1952, W. E. B. Du Bois stepped onto the stage of the ballroom of the Hotel Diplomat in Midtown Manhattan. His beard was grizzled and he was still working out how to lecture through new dentures. In a word, he was old. During his long life, he’d witnessed the dawn of Jim Crow and the glow of the first atom bombs; the slaughter of the Comanche and the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Wars had broken and reshaped Du Bois’s world, and he had recently been one of the most prominent victims of the Red Scare, ordered to surrender his passport because of his Communist organizing. Yet here he was, preparing to deliver new insight and optimism to the audience before him.

“I have seen something of human upheaval in this world,” he told the crowd, recalling “the scream and shots of a race riot in Atlanta” and “the marching of the Ku Klux Klan.” But his recent travels had taken him to a place that had shaken him: the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis had razed the ghetto in 1943, slaughtering more than 50,000 people on the night before Passover to crush a rebellion by the Polish Jews being held captive there. When Du Bois got there, in 1949, the city was still being rebuilt. Speaking at the behest of Jewish Life magazine—now Jewish Currents—Du Bois said the visit had helped him reconceive the “Negro problem” as part of a larger constellation of global struggles against oppression. He had been cured of a “certain social provincialism” and sought a way for “both these groups and others to reassess and reformulate the problems of our day, whose solution belongs to no one group.” For Du Bois, the path forward was simple: solidarity.

Du Bois’s vision has been deeply influential in the decades since he delivered his “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” speech. Similar sentiments moved Jewish students to take buses to the Mississippi Delta in the summer of 1964, and brought both Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali to oppose the Vietnam War. Solidarity spurred students and people of color to call for American divestment from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, and has more recently brought Black activists to Standing Rock. The notion of global minorities and underclasses sharing common cause was provocative in 1952, but is now a constant in progressive circles, and has a special force among mainstream Black American institutions and politics, regardless of ideology.

But the past year has thrown Du Bois’s prescription into crisis. Most Americans expressed horror and sympathy for the Israeli victims of Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7, the deadliest assault on Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Israel’s counterassault against Hamas in Gaza has killed thousands of civilians and caused a dire humanitarian crisis, all with the backing of the United States. As about 100 hostages still languish in captivity, the horror and sympathy remain. But the continued violence in Gaza has strengthened, among many, and especially among many Black observers, another feeling: solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Many of the resulting protests against Israel’s conduct, and statements of empathy for Palestinians, have been met with censorship by universities and state governments, and with derision and dismissal by the media. This has been particularly true for expressions of solidarity that are based on the Black experience in America, which have often been disparaged as unsophisticated and inauthentic. “The identification of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with America’s race problem was hardly made in America,” the historian Gil Troy argued in Tablet magazine. “It is a recent foreign import,” air-dropped onto a gullible populace.

Of course, the American South is not the Middle East, and there are limits to every comparison. But it is not simplistic or facile to, while acknowledging differences, also see structural similarities over time and space, or to believe that, in a world connected by language, finance, and technology, our systems and ways of being are related. The Black experience has been usefully analogized to the Jewish struggle over the years, and we have clear documentary evidence of the ways that systems of anti-Black and anti-Semitic oppression have been borrowed and translated from one to the other. To claim kinship between Black and Palestinian peoples is merely to apply the same logic. Solidarity means recognizing the parallels and shared humanity among the three groups, and working to create a world that does so as well.

But efforts to create that world are now in danger of being snuffed out. The dehumanization and marginalization of Palestinians in American discourse and media, as well as denunciations of the use of concepts such as “intersectionality” and “decolonization” in relation to Israel, among even liberal commentators, have dovetailed neatly with the ongoing conservative backlash against “wokeness” and Black history. All the while, anti-Semitism is worsening in America and beyond. The fate of multiracial organizing and democracy in America is inextricably bound up with the fates of people halfway around the world.

Can solidarity survive the onslaught in Gaza?

Left: A draft of W. E. B. Du Bois’s speech “The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto” from April 1952. Right: Du Bois (Special Collections and University Archives / University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture).

First, some words about that onslaught. Israel responded to Hamas’s brutal incursion, in which assailants killed more than 1,200 Israeli citizens and captured hundreds as hostages, with an offensive that has killed more than 42,000 Palestinians, an estimate from the Gaza Health Ministry. (Hamas runs the ministry, but the World Health Organization and the United Nations consider its numbers generally reliable.) As of April, nearly 23,000 of those fatalities were identifiable by names and identification numbers issued by Israel. According to some experts, if people who die from disease or injury, as well as those found buried in rubble, are included, the true toll could be much higher. War is war, and the great, unavoidable tragedy of war is civilian death. But unavoidable is not synonymous with purposeful.

The Israeli campaign has, as a matter of strategy, regularly and knowingly subjected Palestinian civilians to violence. The Israel Defense Forces have targeted Gazan health-care facilities as civilians were being treated and sheltering there, claiming that militants use the facilities and that hostages were held in them (an explanation that the U.S. State Department has backed up as credible). Israeli air strikes have devastated Palestinian refugee camps, including a strike in Rafah in May that killed dozens of civilians along with two top Hamas commanders.

The UN and the U.S. Agency for International Development have both concluded that Israel blocked shipments of food aid to Gaza, a finding that under both U.S. and international law should make continued weapons shipments to Israel illegal. (The Biden administration rejected the finding, but has since written a letter demanding that Israeli officials improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza within 30 days.) The IDF has struck the same UN-backed school building five times , saying it was targeting militants. According to the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 129 Palestinian and Lebanese journalists and media workers have been killed, making this the deadliest period for journalists since the group began keeping records in 1992. Last month, Israel shipped 88 unidentified Palestinian bodies back to Gaza in the back of a truck. And earlier this month, the United States launched an investigation of allegations of widespread sexual abuse of Palestinian detainees, months after video depicting an alleged sexual assault at the Sde Teiman detention camp leaked on social media.

Those who survive are facing the depths of deprivation. Almost 2 million people in Gaza are hungry or starving. For pregnant women, stress and terror are contributing to a spike in preterm births, and doctors describe seeing stillbirths, newborn deaths, and malnourished infants. Deteriorating public-health conditions have resulted in a wave of contagious skin diseases among children, and what the UN calls a “frightening increase” in Hepatitis A infections. The WHO is rushing to vaccinate Palestinians against polio after Gaza’s first confirmed case in a quarter century. This is a human catastrophe, documented and verified over the past year by the United States and other countries, the international diplomatic and legal community, nongovernmental organizations, reputable news outlets, and, not least, Palestinians themselves.

A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov shows a steady drop in American sympathy toward Israel, and a corresponding rise in sympathy toward Palestinians; earlier polls have shown that a majority of Americans disapprove of Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and want America to send humanitarian aid to Gaza in lieu of more weapons to Israel. Yet one demographic group that broke early in this direction was Black Americans. In a New York Times/Siena College poll taken in December 2023, Black respondents already overwhelmingly supported an immediate cease-fire, and were much less likely than white respondents to endorse any action that endangered more civilians. Altogether, Black respondents were more likely to sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel, and more likely than not to believe that Israel was not “seriously interested in a peaceful solution.” In a June CBS News poll, nearly half of Black respondents said they wanted the U.S. to encourage Israel to completely stop its military actions in Gaza, while only 34 percent of white respondents did.

These sentiments aren’t limited to young activists and leftists. Even moderate and legacy Black institutions have expressed them. In June, the NAACP called on the Biden administration to stop shipping weapons to Israel, arguing that the president “must be willing to pull the levers of power when appropriate to advance liberation for all.” In February, the Council of Bishops, the leadership branch of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called for an end to American support for Israel and an immediate cease-fire. Noting both the connection of Black folks to Palestinians and the historical linkages between the Black and Jewish plights—and the deep theological affinity of Black-liberation thought with the story of the ancient Jews—the AME statement said that “the cycle of violence between historically wounded peoples will not be dissolved by the creation of more wounds or through weapons of war.” The statement also accused the United States of “supporting this mass genocide.”

In January, more than a thousand Black pastors—representing congregations totaling hundreds of thousands of mostly working-class Black people—urged President Joe Biden to push for a cease-fire. The leaders made a pragmatic case: They feared that Black voters, typically reliable backers of the Democratic Party (and Biden in particular), might not show up to the polls in November if the deaths in Gaza continued. But they also made a moral argument based in solidarity: “We see them as a part of us,” the Reverend Cynthia Hale of Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia, told The New York Times. “They are oppressed people. We are oppressed people.”

This sympathy toward Palestinians is shared widely across Black communities—by Black activists, commentators, clergy, and white- and blue-collar professionals of all age groups. Identification with the Palestinian cause stretches back well before the current conflict, showing up in polls as early as the 1970s. This solidarity is based on a number of factors, but the main one is obvious: Black people see what is happening to Palestinians, and many feel the tug of the familiar in their heart.

Attempts like Hale’s to analogize the experiences of Black people with those of Palestinians have often been met with a simple insistence that they are wrong; that they have confused things; that relations between Palestinians and Israelis are too complex to allow any comparison. In 1979, at the United Nations, the chief Israeli delegate, Yehuda Blum, chided leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil-rights organization founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy, for calling for a Palestinian homeland. “Understandably, they are less knowledgeable about the Middle East conflict than other parties,” Blum said.

In 2020, during the height of America’s purported “racial reckoning,” the Haaretz commentator Nave Dromi wrote that there were simply no commonalities between the struggles of Black Americans and Palestinians, claiming that Palestinians “don’t want genuine peace, in contrast to blacks in the United States, who do seek to live in peace with their American compatriots.” In 2021, in the pages of this magazine, the writer Susie Linfield said that the concept of “intersectionality” had been improperly applied to analogizing the Black and Palestinian struggles, in a way that can “occlude complex realities, negate history, prevent critical thinking, and foster juvenile simplifications.”

It is true that analogy has its limits for any political situation, and that, especially among journalists, nuance and context are crucial components of the arsenal of understanding. But often, regard for “complexity” in this particular conflict means treating its history as one hermetically sealed off from the rest of human experience, which in turn short-circuits any attempt to make common cause with Palestinians.

The short-circuiting has only accelerated since October 7. Shortly after Hamas’s attack, Rabbi Mark H. Levin wrote in The Kansas City Star that the argument that Black Americans and Palestinians have parallel experiences is “a popular but false analogy.” According to Alexis Grenell in The Nation, “When outsiders collapse the Palestinian cause into, say, the struggle for Black Lives or LGBTQ rights—while framing that position as virtuous because it’s ‘simple’—it’s not only wrong but counterproductive.”

Behind these objections is, perhaps, the very real fear of anti-Semitism—of Jews facing a unique scrutiny born not of compassion, but of hate. And it is indisputably the case that such singling-out does animate odious worldviews, that Hamas has justified its actions with anti-Semitism, and that the group has committed brutal and unspeakable acts. But instead of isolating Jews, solidarity actually situates the state of Israel within a much larger story, one in which brutality is all too common. And standing with oppressed people—including Palestinians, many of whom dream of a future without Hamas—does not require them to be universally righteous; this would in itself be a unique scrutiny.

Still, the fear of anti-Semitism has empowered those who would quell expressions of solidarity, and who were hostile to the idea long before October 7. In the past year, the insistence on Palestinian-Israeli relations as an inscrutable cipher, and the rejection of attempts to analogize the Black and Palestinian situations, have contributed to a broader aversion to multiracial organizing. In November 2023, the Free Press’s Bari Weiss made this argument explicit in an essay about college campuses: DEI efforts, she argued, were tantamount to “arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.”

Since the 1960s, student protesters have often borrowed from the logic and language of Black protest, and many left-wing organizers on campuses have compared the Black and Palestinian experiences. During the invasion of Gaza, as universities became the locus of pro-Palestinian protest, many on both the left and the right saw the activism as proof that students’ minds had been warped by left-wing orthodoxy. Universities targeted their own protesting students with police crackdowns, canceled commencement addresses, and conspicuously revised speech and conduct codes, while politicians sought to pass laws that would ban forms of free expression, including an executive order from Texas Governor Greg Abbott that requires universities to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that could reasonably see students expelled for criticizing Israel. Many ostensibly stalwart defenders of the First Amendment have found themselves tongue-tied.

This environment has invigorated people who were already calling for crackdowns on “wokeness.” The right-wing activist Chris Rufo used the backlash against student protests to try to oust administrators at elite universities who were too friendly toward diversity and other presumably leftist causes. Many other commentators have assailed DEI, decolonization, and critical race theory, often without taking care to define or assess how much currency in our discourse these terms actually have. The Black intellectuals who helped spin solidarity into real practice are often summoned, solely for the purpose of exorcism. All of these names and theories have been stripped of meaning and context and stewed down to a mush. The objective is not understanding or coherence, but convenience, turning solidarity into a Black bogeyman to destroy.

It should be noted that W. E. B. Du Bois was an early contributor to The Atlantic, and in 1901 risked his fledgling academic credibility to write a story for the magazine defending Reconstruction—when the magazine’s editorial leadership decried the era as a mistake. That essay became the cornerstone of Du Bois’s most famous work, The Souls of Black Folk, in which he first elucidated the concept of the “color line,” which animated his 1952 address in the Hotel Diplomat. It should also be noted that, like many other Black scholars, he saw a mirror of the Black experience under that color line in the historical plight of Europe’s Jews, and explicit links between Nazi policies and Jim Crow. As Hitler began to build the machinery of industrialized genocide, and much of Europe and white America refused Jewish refugees from Germany, historically Black colleges and universities continued to sponsor visa applications. The Black press, early and without equivocation, saw the brewing catastrophe for what it was.

In the years leading up to the Warsaw Ghetto speech, Du Bois had been an ardent Zionist who believed that the creation of a Jewish state would lend legitimacy to Pan-African projects like Liberia, which had been founded as a colonial “promised land” for formerly enslaved Black Americans. But the Liberian project did not provide the promised liberation—indeed, it subjected local people to enslavement, subjugation, and war instead, all at the hands of a colonial elite and foreign companies—and Du Bois’s reluctance to acknowledge that failure was one of his great hypocrisies.

But in his later years, Du Bois followed his own logic to a more ecumenical approach, one that viewed all subjugated peoples as part of a connected global movement. This expansive view of solidarity, as embraced by many in the Black diaspora, did not require that groups have identical struggles or historical contexts in order to create common cause. Rather, it was based on the shared experiences of oppression, dehumanization, and lack of self-determination, especially at the hands of the American empire.

In this context, many Black observers witnessed years of Palestinian suffering, subsidized by American tax dollars and arms shipments—even as Black neighborhoods and schools were deprived of investment—and concluded that something familiar was going on. Many Black intellectuals criticized Israel for its role in conflicts with its Arab neighbors in the 1950s and ’60s, and for allying with apartheid South Africa. For those who were not scholars in foreign policy, there was a constant stream of news images showing meager conditions in Palestinian refugee camps, and forced or restricted movement. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote of his own trip to the region in 2002: “I’ve been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us Black people in South Africa.”

Arguments that the conflict is too complex to compare with other global systems—to the Black experience in particular—have always rung hollow, especially given that both Jim Crow and South African apartheid were often characterized by their defenders as too singular for outsiders to comprehend. In the 1960s, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency devoted to maintaining white supremacy, sent speakers across the country to deliver a set of talking points called “The Message From Mississippi.” In those remarks, the speaker would complain that “the North seemed to know all the answers to our problems without having and knowing the problem,” before explaining patiently that Jim Crow was necessary and right. But this kind of time-wasting and complexification did not stop the northerners who heeded the call to participate in Freedom Summer. They did not need advanced degrees in segregation to know that what they saw on the news was wrong.

One effect of the prominence of the war in Gaza in American media over the past year has been a belated demystification. The deluge of images of flattened buildings, dismembered bodies, and grieving families does not present a conflict that is singular or arcane, but one that is frustratingly, appallingly familiar. After the May air strike on Rafah, the videos and photos that emerged were horrific—and not the least bit “complicated.” The victims were not “human beasts,” as the Israeli general responsible for overseeing Gazan aid described Hamas militants and the Palestinian civilians who celebrated on October 7, but mothers and children, dazed and broken. They deserve the same empathy and protection as any other people, and have been denied it by a constant stream of dehumanization, including decades of rhetoric painting Palestinians as backwards, uncivilized, and incompatible with “Western” values. This is a tactic Black folks know all too well.

In November 2023, Israel’s deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim Vaturi, a member of the governing Likud party, shared on social media his belief that the campaign had been “too humane,” and demanded that Israel “burn Gaza now no less!” Last winter, two members of far-fight ultranationalist parties—Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is a vocal proponent of illegal settlement and annexation in the West Bank, and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, a leader in the Jewish-supremacist movement—called for the expulsion of all of the residents of Gaza. Shortly after the Rafah strike, Nikki Haley, the former Republican candidate for president, visited an artillery post in Israel and wrote Finish Them on an artillery shell. Instigated by extremist leaders and unfettered by the law, Israeli settlers in the West Bank have engaged in a campaign of ruthless violence and dispossession against Palestinian residents, even as the Israeli military has ramped up operations there that have killed hundreds of Palestinians.

Given all this, when Black folks who were raised on stories of lynchings and the threat of obliteration—stories of the Tulsa Massacre, of the quelling of Nat Turner’s Rebellion, of the Red Summer—look at Gaza, how could they not see something they recognize?

Rafah, May 5, 2024 (Hatem Khaled / Reuters)

When Du Bois gave his 1952 speech, Israel was a new state with an uncertain future. The Holocaust was not yet a matter of memory but a matter of present urgency, and across Europe, Jewish refugees still made temporary homes in displaced-persons camps. Du Bois had wept for victims of lynchings in the United States, and his grief was naturally extended to Jews who had lost family members, and who feared mightily about their ability to exist on this Earth as a people.

The Holocaust is more distant in time now, but not much more distant than Jim Crow, which is to say that it is living history, and that the staggering pain of genocide—and the attendant anxiety about future erasure—remains an essential part of how those of us seeking to build a global moral community should understand the world. That requires understanding the shock and profound loss of the global Jewish community on October 7. Solidarity demands that right-minded global citizens reckon with the stubborn persistence of anti-Semitism in the world, and its resurgence in the past few decades.

Solidarity does not demand, however, that they endorse another massacre, or the continued subjugation of another people. In fact, it demands the opposite. “A truly intersectional approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Susie Linfield wrote, “would, of necessity, incorporate the Jewish people’s torturous history of expulsion, pariahdom, statelessness, and genocide.” This is undeniably true, and would then logically make an imperative of standing in solidarity with any group facing such circumstances.

The widespread backlash against that imperative is perhaps the chill in the air preceding the storm of the next four years, auguring a world of warring tribes, of us versus them. Trumpism, the ideology that backs the most authoritarian crackdowns on student protests and free speech, is hostile to Jews and Palestinians, and positions solidarity as the main enemy to a state built purely on the pursuit of self-interest. Already, this is a world where Palestinians are marginalized in the media and in policy, and one where neo-Nazis are emboldened and anti-Semitism continues to rise. Americans have always believed themselves to be at the moral center of the world, and here they have a case. The militarism and dehumanization endorsed by so many Americans are important exports, as are the American armaments that have killed thousands of Palestinian children before they could experience the wonder of learning to ride a bicycle.

This may all sound like an anti-war argument in general, and it is. Reeling from the horrors of the World Wars and the atomic age, Du Bois grew preoccupied with finding a solution to war itself. He came to understand that domestic systems of oppression and global wars shared a common root of systematized dehumanization, manufactured by the global color line. For Du Bois, true peace was the only way forward, and it required “extend[ing] the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples” across the world.

Several other Black leaders reached similar conclusions in their intellectual lives, ultimately linking global pacifism to the project of racial egalitarianism. In the years before his death, King, operating from his framework of the “three evils” of poverty, militarism, and racism, came out to oppose the Vietnam War. “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government,” King said in his best-known denunciation of the war. He spoke specifically of Black empathy with the Vietnamese. “They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met,” he said. “They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.”

What would Du Bois have said about the tragedy in Gaza? Over his long career, he worked to build a coherent philosophy on the basic principle of seeing all humanity as worth saving. He contradicted himself, made grievous errors, and often fell short of his own ethics in this quest. By the time he found himself speaking in the Hotel Diplomat, he’d amassed enough conflicting views to be his own best interlocutor. But he always professed, as found in his “Credo,” a belief “in Liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.”

Du Bois’s guiding principle was not so different from the founding ethos of the abolitionist magazine that had helped catapult him to fame. In 1892, Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the founders of The Atlantic, gave an unambiguous definition of the American idea that his magazine contemplated: “emancipation.”

Emerson’s view was forged at a time when abolitionist arguments were censored in some institutions, abolitionists could be lynched if they journeyed to the wrong corner of America, and the supposed savagery and bloodthirst of the American Negro was the predominant moral argument for keeping him in chains. Emerson made a choice that was then bold and unusual among the white literati: to view Black people as humans, and to rebuild his philosophy around that conclusion. Emerson chose solidarity, and wrote against the scourge of slavery. He did so because emancipation, that American idea, demanded it.

Today, emancipation still demands much of us. It requires that we create a world in which the Holocaust could never happen again, which by definition means a world in which a holocaust could never happen again. It would also necessarily be one in which there would be no mass killings in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, no famine in Sudan, no children held in cages at the American border, no steady procession of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean, no killing of thousands of children in Gaza.

America is clearly failing miserably in that work. The ascendant political ideology gripping both parties views solidarity with suspicion, a suspicion that colors our global realpolitik. The United States remains committed to providing the bombs that kill children, even while—somehow—calling for a cease-fire.

“Where are we going—whither are we drifting?” asked Du Bois in 1952. On the one hand, we have solidarity. On the other, ruin.

Why the EPA Backed Down

2024-09-23T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs by Donavon Smallwood

Updated at 3:40 p.m. ET on September 23, 2024

On a warm November afternoon in 2021, I drove out from New Orleans, following the Mississippi River north to the town of Reserve, in Louisiana’s St. John the Baptist Parish. As I approached the green mound of the river’s levees, a shadow fell over my windshield. The towering silhouettes of massive chemical plants and refineries dominated the horizon. Nestled among them were clusters of schools, stores, and houses. It was a fitting welcome to the region known to many as “Cancer Alley”—the 85-mile stretch along the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.

Michael Regan, at the time still new in his job as the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, stood in a field beside a small wooden house. Behind him, a Marathon refinery complex belched bright-orange gas flares. The house belonged to a 65-year-old man named Michael Coleman, who had detailed to Regan a list of health problems that he said had come from living in the shadow of the refinery. Regan worked the crowd in attendance, a group of residents and activists, and did the usual politician things: remembering and repeating names, flashing a brilliant smile, performing those two-handed-clasp handshakes that signal extra authenticity.

But certain other things that needed no signaling endeared Regan to the crowd. First was the fact that he was there at all. Second was, bluntly, the fact that, like most of the people he was meeting, Regan is Black. The crowd listened intently as the administrator spoke. “I’m able to put faces and names with this term that we call ‘environmental justice,’” Regan said. He promised the crowd that he would use the power of his office to make sure that those who needed resources the most got them.

As Regan observed, the people there were reminders of a brutal reality: Black, Indigenous, Latino, and low-income communities are far more likely to experience environmental problems—contamination, dumping, flooding, burning—than people in high-income, majority-white areas. To give one example: Black people suffer 54 percent more pollution from industrial facilities than do other Americans, which contributes to child-asthma rates that are about twice as high as those of white children. Black people are also 75 percent more likely than other Americans to live close to industrial facilities that generate hazardous waste. The movement to combat such inequalities is known as environmental justice.

Many of those gathered for Regan’s visit were veterans of that movement, and had been part of local campaigns to curb air and water pollution. In the face of hostility from the oil, gas, and chemical companies that dominate the area, and of disregard from all levels of government, they had commissioned independent studies showing extraordinary rates of exposure to carcinogens among Black residents, along with cancer rates 44 percent higher than the national average. After decades of silence, a visit from the administrator was a breakthrough.

Left: A road between the Marathon Petroleum Refinery and the Cargill Grain Mill in Reserve, Louisiana. Right: Michael Regan stands near the Marathon refinery in Reserve. (Bryan Tarnowski; Gerald Herbert / AP)

I joined Regan in the back of a black SUV on the way to his next destination, in nearby St. James Parish. We took the bridge across the Mississippi, overlooking the historic Whitney Plantation, then followed the curve of the levee west. “You know,” he said, “it’s not lost on me that these people look like me and I look like them.” I asked him what the folks in Reserve had told him privately after his public remarks. “They said that this visit felt different than the visits before, but there were no visions of grandeur,” he responded. His predecessors had failed to deliver on promises, and people here remembered that.

As we sped along, I envisioned how the area must have looked generations ago, with a sprawl of plantations where the ancestors of many of Cancer Alley’s residents were forced to toil. I thought about how those plantations had been reborn as sharecropping hubs and then, ultimately, after Louisiana struck oil, repackaged into the massive complexes one sees today. I wondered how Regan’s focus might be tested when faced with the weight of all that history, a history that is inseparably linked to the environmental picture today.

Regan was and is guarded and disciplined, and has learned the political art of cliché, as I discovered during a series of conversations with him over the past three years. When asked about the challenges of delivering on environmental-justice promises, he often asserted that environmental justice is “in the DNA” of the EPA, a contention that seems more aspirational than realized. When we talked about the relationship between the history of white supremacy in America and the reality of environmental injustice today, Regan consistently defaulted to the need to be “laser focused” on the present. In our conversations, Regan made clear that he didn’t intend to spend much time talking about the past.

In the three years since that November visit, Regan has rebuilt an EPA that was gutted by Donald Trump and has presided over an era of unprecedented climate-policy gains. The EPA has enforced a stronger Clean Air Act, advanced new rules to limit pollution from power plants and vehicles, enacted a landmark rule to eliminate “forever chemicals” in drinking water, and doled out billions of dollars to projects that transform local energy grids and reduce greenhouse gases. Partly as a result of the EPA’s new rules, the U.S. reduced its emissions in 2023 and looks poised to continue that trend.

At the same time, the EPA has faced a string of adverse rulings in federal courts that could seriously limit its effectiveness. And its record on environmental justice is more uneven than many of those who attended that meeting in Reserve back in 2021 might have hoped for.

Regan regularly touts environmental-justice victories as central to the EPA’s mission. But following attacks from Republicans seeking to disempower the agency, he has made some awkward tactical retreats. He may wish to keep a laser focus on the here and now, but his agenda—and his very presence, perhaps, as a Black man wielding broad authority—has stirred up the ghosts of the past. He has learned the hard way why environmental justice has always been a struggle against long odds.

On the day he was confirmed to lead the EPA, in March 2021, Michael Regan stared down an enormous task. Over the previous four years, the agency had been the main casualty of Trump’s assault against the federal bureaucracy in the name of “draining the swamp.” Trump’s first pick to lead the EPA, the climate-denier Scott Pruitt, sought to scale back much of its core work and repeatedly proposed a dramatic reduction of the budget. More than 1,500 employees left the agency in the first 18 months of the Trump administration, reducing the workforce to levels not seen since Ronald Reagan’s presidency. By the time Regan got there, staffing and morale both were depleted.

President Joe Biden entrusted Regan with a climate agenda that would require the EPA to be more aggressive, nimble, and creative than it had ever been. But the White House couldn’t immediately secure additional funds to expand the EPA’s ranks of experts. So, in the first year and a half under Regan, the agency’s staff worked long hours and late shifts to try to handle a brief that had expanded dramatically.

On the heels of the murder of George Floyd and the purported “racial reckoning” of 2020, the Biden administration also made racial justice one of its key priorities throughout the government. As only the second Black person to lead the EPA, Regan became a natural face for this effort. He had worked in the agency before, during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and was well known in environmental-justice circles for his time leading North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality.

The EPA, however, had never enjoyed a great reputation for environmental justice. In the years since its inception, the agency had in many cases sided with industry on decisions to locate plants and hazardous-waste facilities near minority neighborhoods. Across all of its different roles—coordinating cleanups, distributing funds, advancing laws to limit air and water pollution—the agency has been accused of excluding or actively hurting minority communities.

Moreover, in its capacity as a civil-rights watchdog, the EPA had been a clear failure. Under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the EPA is explicitly authorized to take action against the unfavorable treatment of racial minorities by entities that it regulates and funds. A 2015 analysis by the Center for Public Integrity found that the EPA had rejected a number of civil-rights petitions from communities on the grounds that they had missed a 20-day statutory deadline—but the EPA itself appeared to have held up those petitions for an average of 254 days. The same report revealed that the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights had not made a single formal finding of discrimination—ever. Theoretically, any such finding would have given the EPA the power to compel polluters to clean up and to negotiate with affected communities, along with the power to penalize companies that failed to cooperate, but that authority was never defined or tested, because it was never used.

Michael Regan talks to residents of the Fifth Ward during a tour in Houston on November 19, 2021. (Elizabeth Conley / Houston Chronicle / Getty)

Regan’s first big move upon taking office to address the EPA’s previous failures was a listening tour, which the EPA called its “Journey to Justice.” In addition to Cancer Alley, stops included Black neighborhoods in Jackson, Mississippi; Houston; and New Orleans. Regan also visited Puerto Rico, North Carolina, and Appalachia.

I traveled with the administrator on several of these trips, and his personal presence seemed to me as important as any policy that he might put forward. He inspected a cistern in a rural mountain town in Puerto Rico and listened as Jackson residents told him about having to boil their water to make it potable. At every stop that I attended on Regan’s tour, residents told me the visit itself had changed their outlooks. “That was a once-in-a-lifetime” thing, Sharon Lavigne, the president of Rise St. James, an environmental-justice organization, said after Regan’s visit to Cancer Alley. For her, the fact that the EPA went to people who had been overlooked and forgotten represented a major reversal.

At Texas Southern University, in Houston, Regan was greeted by Robert Bullard, a professor of urban planning and environmental policy, widely known as the “father of environmental justice.” Bullard had pushed for many of the environmental-justice powers that the federal government now holds, and helped create some. Over the previous three decades, Bullard had often criticized the EPA for what he believed was the agency’s abdication of its duty to protect communities of color. Yet, he embraced Regan, and praised him lavishly. To me, it seemed like the passing of the torch from the father of a movement to the man who hoped he’d be the son.

Michael Regan at the EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Donavon Smallwood for The Atlantic)

Michael Regan was born in Goldsboro, North Carolina, in 1976. At the time, Robert Bullard was a young sociologist in the early stages of studying the very communities where Regan’s family fished and farmed. Regan’s mother worked as a nurse, and his father served with the Army in Vietnam, then worked as a USDA agricultural-extension agent, and eventually joined the National Guard full-time. Previous generations had been farmers, and Michael Regan was keenly aware of the drive among Black families to own and work the land.

The flip side of this tie to the land has always been a profound vulnerability. Goldsboro is a mostly Black town in a belt of Black towns, all emerging from plantation slavery, in North Carolina’s inner coastal plain. Since emancipation, the area has been known for its tradition of freeholding Black farmers and independent Black communities. It is also known, not coincidentally, for its pollution, floods, and environmental devastation. (Like Regan, I am from a farming family in eastern North Carolina; both of our hometowns were submerged by Hurricane Floyd in 1999.)

When Regan was a toddler, with the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s not far in the rearview mirror, this landscape of inequity became the setting for a different kind of movement. In 1978, the government of North Carolina scrambled to find a way to clean up thousands of tons of soil that had been contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls, chemicals classified by the EPA as probable carcinogens, after truckers had illegally dumped oil containing the chemicals on state roads rather than disposing of it properly. With the approval and assistance of the EPA, which had then been in existence for only eight years, the state chose to dump the contaminated soil in a landfill in Afton, a mostly Black hamlet in rural Warren County, about 80 miles north of Goldsboro. Officials had decided to clean up the land—by saddling a Black community with the pollution.

The decision sparked one of the most consequential and well-organized Black protests since the heyday of the civil-rights struggle. In 1982, after years of legal challenges and complaints, Black and white Warren County residents and sympathetic protesters lay down in the road to try to bar construction vehicles from the landfill site. Hundreds of people were arrested. The residents lost that battle—the landfill was built and trucks duly tipped the toxic dirt into it—but the national attention the campaign garnered helped recast it not as a local one-off but as the face of a larger problem. After being arrested for participating in the 1982 protest, the activist and publisher Ben Chavis coined the term environmental racism to describe the actions by the state and the EPA. Bullard would later define environmental justice as environmental racism’s opposing force. For its actions in Warren County, the EPA itself became the first villain of the environmental-justice era.

Regan was steeped in this history. He also understood the deep tensions between organizations like the EPA and communities like Afton, especially during a time when, as Bullard recalled when we spoke, justice was “a novel idea” within the agency. Regan believes that decisions such as the one involving the Afton landfill were made not out of malice but out of ignorance and neglect. “They definitely were not well acquainted with the communities,” he explained, referring to EPA officials. “So it was almost as if Warren County and those community members didn’t matter.”

It was fitting, then, that Regan would return to Warren County in September 2022 to announce the formation of the new Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, which would enjoy the highest possible status in the EPA. Flanked by Chavis and by the Reverend William Barber II, a civil-rights champion who, like Regan, is from eastern North Carolina, Regan pledged that everything he and the EPA did from then on “will be rooted in the realities and the demands and the aspirations of communities like Warren County, North Carolina; Mossville, Louisiana; Jackson, Mississippi; and so many others whose future hasn’t always felt certain.”

Reverend Ben Chavis raises his fist as fellow protesters are taken to jail at the Warren County PCB landfill near Afton, North Carolina, on Thursday, September 16, 1982. (Greg Gibson / AP)

The EPA’s environmental-justice agenda is broad. Much of it is powered by the agency’s ability to spend money. As part of the Justice40 Initiative, rolled out by the White House in the early days of Biden’s presidency, the EPA was directed to ensure that 40 percent of the benefits of its broadened climate powers assisted marginalized communities; as part of this commitment, the agency has announced billions in grants from the Inflation Reduction Act to address climate change in places affected by environmental injustice. The EPA also allocated billions of dollars from the 2021 infrastructure bill for lead-pipe removal and pollution cleanup in disadvantaged communities. In his role as the head of the agency, Regan has had immense influence.

But Regan wanted to do more than direct the distribution of new funding: The EPA also began to use civil-rights powers that it had previously neglected, enabling direct remediation of environmental injustices—not always at federal-government expense—and also calling out discrimination by name. In April 2022, the agency launched a civil-rights investigation of the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. The investigation was aimed at the Denka Performance Elastomer facility (Denka has denied wrongdoing) and another proposed plastics plant in St. James Parish, as well as at the general permitting practices of state and local bodies up and down Cancer Alley. In September of that year, the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights sent a letter to Louisiana officials to report its preliminary findings. The office asserted that “based on the data EPA has reviewed thus far, Black residents of the Industrial Corridor Parishes continue to bear disproportionate elevated risks of developing cancer from exposure to current levels of toxic air pollution.” In October, the EPA also opened an investigation in Jackson, Mississippi, based on a civil-rights complaint from the NAACP, which alleged that the state had withheld funds for fixing the majority-Black city’s failing water infrastructure, and had done so for reasons based on race.

These moves faced a significant obstacle: Without clear proof of racist intent, discrimination can be hard to establish. When it comes to environmental laws, permitting decisions, and industrial siting, unfavorable treatment rarely comes with outright declarations of bigotry. More typically, minority communities become de facto targets because they lack the political capital and other resources to challenge industrial polluters. Additionally, many communities inherit zoning laws, land-use ordinances, and hazardous sites that originated decades ago under more explicitly racist rationales—essentially making them victims of environmental redlining. Time is a great launderer.

A company may claim that a siting decision, say, was based simply on the availability of cheap land and had nothing to do with discrimination. But discrimination may explain why the land was cheap in the first place. In the 1950s, when big petrochemical companies came to Louisiana’s river parishes, they invariably built near Black communities, where most residents were disenfranchised. Those communities then became the anchors for an entire corridor—a “sacrifice zone,” as such locales are known.

A legal approach known as “disparate-impact theory” attempts to acknowledge this reality. Instead of solely trying to establish purposeful bigotry, it looks plainly at the racial effects of specific policy decisions. This theory has proved to be a powerful corrective when it comes to enforcing civil-rights law, particularly in voting-rights cases, and in policing, where so-called color-blind policies have clearly and consistently hurt Black citizens. After a police officer killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, for example, the Justice Department found that Black residents of Ferguson were disproportionately likely to be stopped by police; under a consent decree, the police have overhauled their policies and procedures.

But disparate-impact theory is controversial. It is detested by many conservatives, who generally view its use as a way to divine racism where there is none, and who often counter that forcing companies and states to proactively take race into account in their decision making is itself racism. Those detractors have hoped for decades to use the courts to invalidate the disparate-impact approach.

Oil- and chemical-refinery plants sit beside Black communities along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge, in October 1998. (Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis / Getty)

Michael Regan prays alongside marchers on March 6, 2022, during an anniversary commemoration of “Bloody Sunday” in Selma, Alabama. The Edmund Pettus Bridge was the site of police beatings of civil-rights activists during the first march for voting rights, on March 7, 1965. (Brandon Bell / Getty)

Amid a wider backlash against racial-justice efforts in America, the civil-rights investigations launched by Regan and the EPA in the Deep South made them targets. Among Republicans, the investigations helped earn the agency a reputation for being “woke.” And, undoubtedly, it was easier to pin that reputation on a Black man, no matter how meticulous he was about focusing on the present, not the past.

In response to the EPA’s preliminary finding of a disparate racial impact of pollution in Cancer Alley, Louisiana’s then–attorney general, Jeff Landry, filed a lawsuit in 2023 alleging that the agency had overstepped its civil-rights authority and had also become too closely allied with environmental-advocacy groups. Landry, now the governor and the leader of a conservative movement reshaping the state in every sphere, said in the filing that EPA officials had decided to “moonlight” like “social justice warriors fixated on race.” (Landry’s office did not respond to requests for an interview or for comment.)

As Republican attacks and threats of vigorous litigation proliferated, the agency began to pull back on its civil-rights investigations. In June 2023, just over a year after it began the Cancer Alley proceedings, the EPA dropped the investigation, citing a procedural issue. “I feel like we were put on the back burner,” Sharon Lavigne told The Washington Post. A few weeks later, the EPA resolved a civil-rights inquiry in Flint, Michigan, with no substantive changes to the state’s environmental-permitting process.

The civil-rights cases had been risky. An adverse ruling in any lawsuit could jeopardize the future of the disparate-impact theory—not just for one agency but for the whole government. That this could happen is a legitimate concern for the EPA, which has little by way of precedent or expertise to work with when it comes to applying disparate-impact theory in environmental law. But for citizens of communities like those in Cancer Alley, who waited years while being stonewalled and redirected, and who felt ignored even during the administration of the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, the agency’s retreat was perceived more as a lack of will than an abundance of caution.

Meanwhile, the backlash against the EPA’s use of its civil-rights authority continued. In January, Judge James Cain of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, a Trump appointee, issued a preliminary ruling in favor of Landry, temporarily enjoining the use of disparate impact in the EPA investigations in Louisiana. He wrote in his opinion that “pollution does not discriminate.” In April, after Regan traveled to Louisiana to announce stricter controls under the Clean Air Act on industrial emissions of ethylene oxide (a known carcinogen) and chloroprene (a likely carcinogen), Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana said on X that “this EPA criminal should be arrested the next time he sets foot in Louisiana” and should be sent to the notorious Angola prison—a former slave plantation where a mostly Black inmate population is still forced to pick cotton.

A week later, a group of 23 Republican state attorneys general sent a letter to the EPA demanding that it end all civil-rights investigations based on disparate impact. The letter said that the concept of environmental justice “asks the States to engage in racial engineering” and argued that disparate-impact theory was forcing states to violate the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The petition was skeptical of the idea of considering race at all in assessing the effects of pollution. “Indeed, the mere act of classifying individuals by their race,” the attorneys general wrote, picking up a formulation from Sandra Day O’Connor, “may stigmatize those groups singled out for different treatment.” In other words, according to the petitioners, it was Regan who was being racist.

Three weeks after the letter from the attorneys general, the EPA dropped its investigation into Mississippi’s handling of the water crisis in Jackson, citing insufficient evidence. Louisiana, meanwhile, pressed ahead in federal court. In late August, Judge Cain made his injunction against the EPA in Louisiana permanent. But the legal challenges might not stop there. In his ruling, Cain also opened the door for broader, national challenges to all federal civil-rights enforcement based on disparate impact.

Meanwhile, activists are pushing the EPA, strenuously, to resist the backlash against disparate impact, hoping that the agency won’t give up any more ground. This September, a group of about 50 individuals—lawyers, academics, and directors of environmental-justice organizations—sent the EPA a letter countering the petition from Republican attorneys general and urging the agency to “to take the time needed to fully analyze Title VI and its history and purpose.” The letter specifically criticized the EPA’s actions in Cancer Alley, asserting that the agency “caved” as a result of the Louisiana lawsuit. Among the signatories was Robert Taylor, a resident of St. John Parish, who had joined Regan during his first visit to the town of Reserve.

In late June, I attended an address Regan gave to hundreds of his staff, gathered together under the gilded ceiling of the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium, next door to the EPA’s offices. Heralded by Luther Vandross’s “Never Too Much” and again accompanied by the civil-rights activist Ben Chavis, Regan walked to the podium. He gave a rousing address celebrating the agency’s achievements on climate and environmental justice, and lobbed more than a few shots at Biden’s predecessor, whom he did not name. The auditorium was packed—a reminder of Regan’s success in attracting professionals back to the agency.

The next day, I met Regan in his office at the EPA’s headquarters in Washington. Just a few minutes earlier, as I was heading to the interview, the Supreme Court had issued its pivotal decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturning Chevron v. NRDC, a 40-year-old ruling that had given the EPA broad discretion to interpret environmental law. In another ruling the previous day, the Court had paused the EPA’s ability to enforce a rule regarding pollution that crossed state lines. Regan’s vision for the EPA had never been more imperiled.

“We’re kind of digesting and taking a look at what was written by the judges,” Regan told me as we settled into armchairs. “It’s worrisome that there are certain interests in this country that are trying to take power away from the very folks that need protection from environmental injustices.” We sat by an unlit fireplace in a room that he’d clearly grown into. A couch was adorned with a blanket from his alma mater, North Carolina A&T. The office displayed artwork from his 10-year-old son, Matthew. Regan told me about his frequent trips back to our home state, where his parents always demand more time with their grandson, and where he goes fishing to clear his mind.

I asked Regan about the notoriety he’d achieved in the eyes of the Republicans. “Quite frankly, it just seems to me that anything we do, no matter what it is, is going to be criticized,” Regan said. “And so with that in mind, it only makes me more emboldened, more strident, but also cautious in terms of the actions that we take.” To Regan, boldness and caution are not at odds with each other. I, however, was not so sure.

Regardless, caution of a sort is understandably top of mind at the EPA today, and it was on my mind too. I wanted to know how, in the latter half of this year, Regan might future-proof the EPA against the possibility that Trump returns to office. “The previous administration was something that no one had ever seen before,” he said. “There was a shock that happened to this place that I think shook it to its core.” I suddenly understood that the previous day’s event had been intended as a pep rally, hoping to persuade career employees to stay committed in uncertain times, especially after losses in federal courts. That effort—to manage morale, to bet on the bureaucracy—is itself perhaps the best available form of future-proofing, if still imperfect. A large team of seasoned professionals in the middle ranks of a government agency, committed to a mission, is a significant force.

Regan never bit on my questions about doomsday scenarios under a possible Trump presidency. He wanted to talk about the EPA’s wins instead. Regan and the agency may have had to abandon some of their broader civil-rights investigations, but they had other levers to pull—the investment of many billions, for one, and a variety of enforcement actions. The EPA is overseeing the federal takeover of the water infrastructure in Jackson while also providing a $600 million grant for an overhaul of the system. The same Clean Air measures that earned Regan the threat of arrest in Louisiana will in all likelihood dramatically reduce pollution by the Denka plant in Cancer Alley—although the state recently secured a two-year deadline for the plant to comply, superseding the EPA’s original 90-day compliance window.

Regan meets with senior officials at the EPA headquarters. (Donavon Smallwood for The Atlantic)

Many activists had visions of the EPA playing a role akin to the Department of Justice in the 1960s, actively naming racism and rooting it out. Those visions have not been realized. I asked Regan why the agency had dropped the investigations that had been the signature of its environmental-justice efforts—why caution had trumped boldness in those cases—and he all but confirmed my suspicion: The EPA feared that pushing too hard could backfire. As Regan saw it, any vulnerabilities in the cases could undercut the disparate-impact approach altogether—perhaps destroying much of the Civil Rights Act in the process. The threat, he said, was especially acute given the inclinations of a conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in New Orleans, and activists such as Landry, who want “to use the court system to take away these tools.” We returned more directly to one of the major lessons Regan has absorbed during his time in office: the necessity of caution. Regan has encountered the quintessential paradox that all Black politicians in America face: Aggressively working to protect the communities that sent them into government in the first place is usually the quickest way to find oneself out of government. Those who remain typically find success in bending the system rather than attempting to break it.

If the bending saves even one Black community from lead poisoning or one Puerto Rican neighborhood from carcinogens, isn’t that worth it? This is, in many ways, the age-old debate of politics on the margins in America: whether the country can achieve freedom and equality incrementally through institutions or whether those institutions have poison at the root and must be fundamentally remade. The EPA, in pursuing environmental justice, strains against its own history and against some legal interpretations of its powers. But a more forthrightly activist agency would certainly find itself undone.

As a native of eastern North Carolina myself, I began covering environmental justice because I wanted more people to hear about and understand communities like my own—communities like Jackson and Cancer Alley and the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Regan’s time in the EPA has been a success on that same front: awareness. His visits to polluted communities alone were radical reinventions of the agency’s relationship with justice, and have elevated it in the national consciousness.

At the same time, in terms of civil-rights adjudication itself, the EPA will likely finish Biden’s term with a record little better than the ones under his predecessors. And it hangs its hopes on a set of enforcement actions that might be reversed under a Trump administration. As Regan prepares the agency’s rearguard contingencies, one opportunity—the chance for the EPA to put the government’s imprimatur on a statement that places like Cancer Alley have been made to suffer because of racism—slips away.

Regan and I have gone back and forth about this: about the costs and benefits of naming things, about exactly how America’s past should be accounted for in its present governance. “It’s scary for some to think that environmental justice has focused in on past transgressions and how we got there,” Regan said. He is right: It is, for some, indeed scary.

This article previously misstated the details of Michael Regan’s father’s military service.

The Brilliance in James Baldwin’s Letters

2024-08-02T07:00:00-04:00

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“My dear Mr. Meeropol,” the correspondence begins. “Your letter is completely unanswerable because it drags up out of darkness, and confirms, so much.” It was the fall of 1974, and the accolades for If Beale Street Could Talk—his novel depicting a love story interrupted by incarceration—still wreathed all of James Baldwin’s moves. For the moment, he was one of the most famous writers in America. Yet, in the middle of it all, Baldwin took the time to respond to his high-school English teacher Abel Meeropol, an author in his own right who, under the pen name Lewis Allan, wrote the poem “Strange Fruit,” later recorded by Billie Holiday.

Meeropol had reached out to his former student, the “small boy with big eyes,” to reminisce on their time in the classroom. His letter recalled that during one exercise, Baldwin had decided to write a winter scene by describing “the houses in their little white overcoats,” a delightful detail that presaged a career full of delightful details. In the humblest possible manner, Meeropol also shared his own work, including his titanic poem, which had by that time become the Black American protest song.

[Raoul Peck: James Baldwin was right all along]

Baldwin proceeded to answer the missive that he had called unanswerable. “I don’t remember what you remember,” he wrote, “but if I wrote the line which you remember, then I must have trusted you.” He continued, “I hope you’ll write me again, and I promise to answer.”

Having read through dozens of Baldwin’s letters, which are mostly housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in Harlem, I know that this kind of promise was not an idle one for Baldwin. The archive is full of his exchanges with celebrities, activists, fans, and fellow literati. Alongside The Fire Next Time, they form an epistolary canon that is, in the main, much less well known than his essays, novels, and plays. But on the occasion of what would have been Baldwin’s 100th birthday, consider that letters were actually the form where his light shone brightest. Baldwin’s correspondence showcases that which still makes him a special read today: a belief in the power of human connection to change the world.

Many letters to Baldwin begin with the same salutation: “Dear Jimmy.” He was approachable—both close friends and new acquaintances used the intimate greeting—even as he prompted a deep sense of respect. Those who’d never written to him before nonetheless felt a certain familiarity, while those who regularly wrote to him remained eager for his approval and love.

This duality is evident in letters from the author Alex Haley, then best known for his The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Haley and Baldwin struck up a close correspondence in the late 1960s, one in which Haley often pressed Baldwin to allow him the honor of becoming Baldwin’s biographer; Baldwin tried to gently dissuade Haley from the endeavor. The two also tried to make plans to adapt Haley’s work on Malcolm X for the stage. One gets the sense in their letters that Haley tried hard to impress his friend. During one meeting, Baldwin complimented Haley’s luggage, so Haley had a set sent to him. (It’s not clear whether Baldwin received the set; Haley acquired the proper address from Baldwin’s assistant, and yet the packages were returned to their sender, without the luggage.)

Haley also felt compelled to share with Baldwin the research that would lead to his most famous work, Roots. “Dear Jimmy,” Haley wrote in 1967. “I went through over 1100 itineraries of slave ships, and I found her, unquestionably—the ship that brought over my forebear Kunta Kinte.” Although Haley would go on to invent much of the purported history presented in Roots, his earnest excitement—and the fact that he’d wanted to share the moment with Baldwin—is a small treasure of the archive.

There are other treats as well. Baldwin often invited his friends, including Haley, to visit during his frequent sojourns in Istanbul. One such guest was the actor Marlon Brando, who had been one of Baldwin’s dearest companions since their college days. Brando came on “a mission which was unclear,” according to Baldwin’s biographer David Leeming, one that saw him hounded by much publicity. Brando abruptly traveled back to the States, leaving behind only a note dashed off on hotel letterhead. “Dear Jim, just had to split,” he wrote. “The press are like flies in the outhouse.”

James Baldwin, ghosted! His international friendships were full of comings and goings—a strange combination of aloofness and yearning. Writing to Lena Horne in 1973, he invited the world-famous jazz singer to a Christmas Eve special he was planning that was to be broadcast for incarcerated people. “I think the show might be important,” he told Horne. But the real prize would be an opportunity for the two to catch up. “Please get in touch with me as quickly as you can,” he wrote. “And please remember dear lady, that this strange solitary distant man loves you very much and will always love you.”

[James Baldwin: This morning, this evening, so soon]

Baldwin was a caretaker within his friend group of Black intellectuals and performers, a role that they treasured in their notes to him. Nina Simone, for whom Baldwin had served as a mentor and confidant, wrote to him in 1977, while he was living in the south of France and she in Geneva. Both were in their own kinds of exile, reeling from disillusionment with the racial order in America. Simone had recently fled America in the face of mounting tax bills and was estranged from her husband, who managed her money. But her sunny letter inviting her dear Jimmy to a series of her shows in Paris illustrated his capacity for lifting spirits. “I need to hear from you man! I’m very homesick,” she wrote. “P.S. I wear your scarf all the time.”

Baldwin wrote to Lorraine Hansberry, to Ray Charles, to Maya Angelou. He was one of the people who encouraged a young Black editor at Random House to try her hand at novels. That editor, Toni Morrison, later bemoaned having to pass on Beale Street, writing in her own letter to Baldwin, “It is so beautiful that I wanted to cover it, touch it, promote it, be knowledgeable about it—you know become an If Beale Street Could Talk groupie.” Baldwin was always encouraging his comrades to create, to continue bringing new work into the world. This propensity took on a special significance after the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. In various letters from this period, Baldwin prayed that his generation of writers and artists might dare to persist.

Even in his private correspondence, Baldwin believed in the power of the word to change the world. Regarding assassinations and grief, he jotted down a letter to then–Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in 1963 after the assassination of his older brother President John F. Kennedy. Baldwin wrote on behalf of himself, Hansberry, Horne, and Harry Belafonte, who together had met earlier that year with the younger Kennedy to try to push the administration to more openly support civil rights. Baldwin proved as calculating as he was consoling, imploring Bobby Kennedy to fight on in his brother’s memory. “Death, as we know, is in one way absolutely final; in another, as we know, and as human history proves, it affords the greatest of all challenges to the human spirit,” Baldwin wrote. “A number of our most massive achievements have been snatched from the jaws of death—by we, the living, whose burden of opportunity it is to carry forward the work for which our fallen comrades died.” Kennedy evidently took the group’s words to heart, becoming a stalwart protector of civil rights during his tenure as attorney general and an ally of the movement during his ill-fated presidential campaign.

Baldwin frequently endeavored to turn his epistolary power into action—the man loved an open letter. In 1970, as mail from across the country poured into the New York Women’s Detention Center in support of the activist Angela Davis, who was incarcerated there while facing murder charges, Baldwin added his own letter to the torrent. In his missive, later published in the New York Review of Books, the influence of Black Power on his evolving worldview was clear. “We know that the fruits of this system have been ignorance, despair, and death, and we know that the system is doomed because the world can no longer afford it—if, indeed, it ever could have,” he told Davis. “The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America.”

[Read: The famous Baldwin-Buckley debate still matters today]

In 1974, Baldwin again hoped to use his letters to indict the system. That year, after President Gerald Ford controversially pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, for Nixon’s role in the Watergate scandal, Nelson Rockefeller—the previous governor of New York and incoming vice president—applauded his new partner’s decision as “an act of conscience, compassion, and courage.” In an open letter he seemed to have wanted published by Newsweek, Baldwin excoriated Rockefeller. “If Mr. Rockefeller judges Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon ‘an act of conscience, compassion, and courage,’” he wrote, “then there are American citizens who would like to be informed as to how he judges the no-knock, ‘stop-and-frisk’ laws he, as the governor of New York, instituted in New York State.” Baldwin continued: “This particular American citizen would also like to have described that ‘conscience, compassion, and courage’ which led to the slaughter at Attica,” referring to the 1971 prison uprising that Rockefeller sent police to crush, resulting in the killing of more than 30 men.

Baldwin’s two most famous letters, the two parts of The Fire Next Time, exemplify his masterful use of the form to create intimacy with—and generate empathy in—readers. Their enormous influence, then and now, has inspired an epistolary tradition in the Black literary canon. But I’m most interested in the ways that those same tools inspired Baldwin’s readers in their own lives, and how many of those readers felt compelled to send him letters. Alongside the requests for autographs or photographs are notes that reveal the deeply felt impact of his work on average Americans. “I am just writing you to let you know that your writings have penetrated my being,” one fan wrote in 1973. In 1977, another correspondent wrote that “without reservation,” Baldwin was “one of the five greatest novelists and literatists of this age.” One woman, writing on stationery adorned by a sketch of a rabbit, said that she’d read Beale Street in a single sitting, and that “the last two hours that I have lived in this book have engulfed me with a humbleness that will never leave me.”

My favorite letter in the Baldwin archive, written by hand from a fan in Pittsburgh, regards Beale Street. The writer describes sharing the novel with the man they love, who is incarcerated. “He says he loves all your writing as much as I do,” the letter reads. “And more than that, much more than that, it hasn’t been until I wrote to him about this book that he’s written that he loves me too. It’s like just knowing someone as important and powerful as you are could write seriously about people like us, divided by jails, gave him a new sense of hope, of belief in himself again.” Baldwin’s work may have shaken America’s foundations, but this letter illustrates how his ability to peer into people’s inner lives mattered just as much. He cultivated beauty, even in the bleakest situations, and it often bore fruit.

There are dozens more letters to sift through: love letters, family business, more fan mail, official publishing business, Baldwin’s unusually graceful rejection notes for requests he couldn’t accommodate. In all, they do just as much as Baldwin’s literary works to help explain and diagnose America’s ills. They also help elucidate the ineffable something that makes his work special. Baldwin’s letters closed the distance between past and present, Black and white, prison and the outside, person and person. His elegance is matched only by his humility and care. As with Baldwin’s novels and essays, his letters evince a genuine love for humanity that not even the frustrations and sorrows of the post-civil-rights era could fully extinguish. For Baldwin, the letter was an act of optimism, a bet on the possibility of people seeing themselves in the other.

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What to Watch, Read, and Listen To Today

2024-06-19T07:00:00-04:00

For Juneteenth, three Atlantic writers and editors share their recommendations for what to listen to, read, and watch.

How to Spend Today

“Ooo Baby Baby,” by Aretha Franklin and Smokey Robinson

In 1979, Aretha Franklin sat shoulder to shoulder with Smokey Robinson on a piano bench during an impromptu performance of Robinson’s “Ooo Baby Baby.” Aretha tickled the keys while they harmonized effortlessly, and the Soul Train audience huddled around them in a hushed awe. It’s an intimate and perfectly organic performance, and the chemistry between them is undeniable and unsurprising; they went from childhood friends in Detroit to simultaneous cornerstones of Black American music. I don’t think I’ve ever skipped this rendition when it comes on shuffle. Three minutes of soul in its purest form.

“My Skin My Logo,” by Solange and Gucci Mane

This was a collaboration I never knew I needed. The track from When I Get Home, one of Solange’s more innovative and eccentric projects, is both simple and provocative. These two Black southerners are from opposite ends of the spectrum of Black musical expression—Solange, the Black bohemian foil to her pop-star sister; Gucci, the trap-star icon and a fixture of southern rap—and on this song, they rap about each other. Solange tells us what Gucci likes (to slang, to bang), Gucci tells us what Solange likes (to ball, to shop), and they both collapse on how their self-expression is tied to their Blackness—my skin, my logo.

— Malcolm Ferguson, assistant editor

***

On Juneteenth, by Annette Gordon-Reed

Back in 2021, about a month before Juneteenth became a federal holiday, The Atlantic published an excerpt from Annette Gordon-Reed’s book about its history. When I read the rest of On Juneteenth shortly afterward, I was struck not only by the events that the Pulitzer-winning historian thoroughly researched, but also by the dexterity of her prose. She looks beyond familiar landmark moments such as the Battle of the Alamo to construct a more truthful historical record of Texas and the country. Gordon-Reed also sheds light on the narratives that she encountered only in passing throughout her early education—about people such as Estebanico, an African man who was brought to present-day Texas decades before the start of plantation slavery. With rigor and curiosity, On Juneteenth ensures that memories of Black life are not shrouded by national mythologies.

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, by Saidiya Hartman

Like much of Saidiya Hartman’s more recent work, her 1997 debut book, Scenes of Subjection, illuminates difficult chapters of Black life. She presents an unflinching chronicle of American slavery and does not shy away from depicting the horrors that enslaved people endured when the institution was still legal. But Hartman also shows that liberation did not materialize for Black people with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation—or, for that matter, on Juneteenth. Scenes of Subjection details the haunting racist violence and legal injustices that continued long after the end of the Civil War, and the many other existential threats to Black personhood in the United States. If we begin to examine just how integral chattel slavery was to the nation’s founding, as the book suggests, then perhaps we can better understand the “unfreedom” that has shaped Black life centuries later.

— Hannah Giorgis, staff writer

***

Stax: Soulsville USA (Max)

The Stax: Soulsville USA docuseries is a real treat and a nostalgia trip. It looks at Stax Records, founded in Memphis in 1957 and one of the most influential record labels in American history. The horn-heavy “Stax sound” once challenged Motown for supremacy in soul music, propelled by megahits such as Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man.” I’m a superfan of Otis Redding and Carla Thomas, two artists who recorded for Stax, so I was always in the target audience here—but Stax is a great Juneteenth watch for anybody looking to learn more about Black music.

A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks (Max)

I’ve also been on a serious Gordon Parks kick recently, so for my second recommendation I’ll go with the film A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks. It’s a pretty straightforward documentary about the life of Parks, one of the most important Black photographers and filmmakers of the 20th century, the world he chronicled, and the people he influenced. For anybody who leaves the film inspired to learn more about him, I also recommend preordering the rerelease of Parks’s Born Black, which features his original photographs and essays, out on June 25. It’s a remarkable and stunning work.

— Vann R. Newkirk II, senior editor

P.S.

I also have to mention the (Emmy-winning) film Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, available on Peacock and VOD, which was inspired by my reporting here at The Atlantic.

— Vann

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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What America Owes the Planet

2024-06-11T07:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Before Kyoto and Paris, there was Chantilly. In early 1991, diplomats, scientists, and policy makers from around the world arrived at a hotel conference center near Virginia’s Dulles International Airport, which is famously far from everything. The delegates had been tasked with creating the first international framework for confronting climate change. An ill omen shrouded the proceedings: Virginia was in the grip of a then-record heat wave, with highs of 70 degrees in early February.

The convention unfolded over the course of five sessions and 15 months. For the most part, the attendees weren’t debating whether human industry caused global warming. Rather, their mission was to figure out what to do about it, given the preponderance of the evidence that existed even two generations ago. European delegates wanted to establish binding limits on the emissions that each country could produce, which the American representatives immediately shot down. (At the time, the United States was far and away the largest carbon emitter of any country in the world.) There was almost no international accord at all, until the Japanese delegates promoted a weak proposal with no binding emissions targets, which the U.S. accepted.

The big players had made their statement: They would not oblige themselves to prevent climate change. But a faction of smaller countries had come determined to try to make its mark, too. The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), a group representing dozens of, well, small island states, led by the tiny Pacific nation of Vanuatu, consistently pushed for more ambitious policy. These nations also devised a novel framework, one through which those most affected by climate change would receive funding and support from the countries that had done the most to change the climate. That framework never made it into the final agreement. But history’s dissents can be road maps for the future.

Thirty-three years later, both emissions and global temperatures have increased faster than expected. Crises that were objects of conjecture in 1991 are upon us: We are witnessing extreme weather events, acidification of the oceans, aggressive sea-level rise, megadroughts, megafires, and an inexorable onslaught of heat. These issues tend to be much more destructive for AOSIS nations and other developing countries than for the U.S. and other major economies.

Climate policy, in America and abroad, has also genuinely transformed since 1991. The United States still rejects binding emissions targets, but emissions have been falling since 2005, owing to steady progress in emissions rules, renewable energy, and, recently, wide adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles. Following decades of pressure from AOSIS and from other countries, at the United Nations’ 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) on climate change, in 2022, the U.S. even voted to create a fund through which wealthy nations can help support countries defined as “vulnerable” to climate change.

American support of that program, however, has thus far been nominal at best. Across the world, many otherwise bold sustainability programs merely nod at the necessity of providing direct, debt-free aid to endangered states. (Most climate funding takes the form of loans that increase the debt burdens on already distressed economies.) Wealthy countries seem eager to ease their conscience, not to make real commitments to the countries most exposed to climate disaster.

As the global effort against the climate crisis still struggles with scale and pace, world leaders should rethink their ordering of priorities. The AOSIS proposal represented a radical new way of looking at climate change, one that emphasized accountability. American policy makers have been hostile to this idea, which has inspired a broader movement known as climate reparations, and it remains controversial elsewhere. But climate reparations aren’t just the fairest way to compensate small nations like Vanuatu. They may also be the only way we save ourselves.

The Vanuatu document is remarkable in its prescience. Years before the majority of Americans even believed that climate change affected them, the AOSIS delegates wrote that “the very existence of low-lying coastal and small vulnerable island countries is placed at risk by the consequences of climate change.”

Back then, the coral reefs around the Seychelles had not yet been destroyed. Hurricane Maria had not yet plunged Puerto Rico into a year of darkness. Salt water was not yet regularly flooding Bangladesh’s mustard fields. But there were warnings. Caribbean fishermen had reported drastic climate-related changes to fisheries as early as 1987. In 1989, Hurricane Hugo rampaged through the Caribbean and the U.S., flattening towns and displacing thousands of people on its way to becoming, at the time, the single costliest hurricane in history—a preview of today’s stronger, more volatile storms. Audre Lorde, who’d retired to St. Croix, wrote of her experience with Hugo: “The earth is telling us something about our conduct of living, as well as about our abuse of this covenant we live upon.”

The Vanuatu document is still one of the best commonsense approaches to the politics of climate. To AOSIS, the carbon emissions causing climate change were nothing more than pollution, no different from coal ash or smog. And the document identified industrial nations, with America in the vanguard, as the polluters. This may seem like a straightforward statement of fact. Too often, however, the source of the problem is obscured in the climate debate.

[Read: To hell with drowning]

In recent years, it’s become fashionable to talk of the Anthropocene, a proposed epoch of geologic time, like the Middle Jurassic, in which anthropos, or man, is the main force shaping the natural world. There is no question that people have had a massive effect on the Earth’s ecosystems and its changing climate. But to focus on the role of humanity is to overlook the fact that some humans bear far more responsibility than others.

Over the recorded history of industrial emissions, 20 corporations, such as Chevron and ExxonMobil, as well as state-owned energy companies in places like China and Saudi Arabia have been responsible for more than half of all cumulative carbon emissions, a share that has actually risen to more than 60 percent since 2016. From 1990 to 2020, the cumulative emissions of the United States and the European Union member states, which together account for about a tenth of the global population, were higher than the combined emissions of India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Iran, and South Korea, which account for about 30 percent of the global population. (Even within the nations that emit the most carbon, the burden is not shared equally—according to a 2020 study, the wealthiest 10 percent of American households account for 40 percent of the country’s carbon output.) Leaders in the oil and gas industry have understood climate change as human-driven since at least 1982, when Exxon’s own researchers helped link carbon emissions and rising temperatures, meaning they knowingly made decisions that led to this crisis. (Exxon has denied that its models—which proved remarkably accurate—represented foreknowledge of climate change.) It would be more precise to call our present epoch the Exxonocene.

Recognizing this reality, the AOSIS proposal called for industrialized countries to implement green energy and technology in developing countries, and to create a “loss and damage” fund to compensate countries for future costs stemming from climate change, including permanent climate-related losses of land, habitats, and population, as well as damages that could be remediated.

[Read: The West agreed to pay climate reparations. That was the easy part.]

The loss-and-damage plan was modest, in its way: Its demands were purely forward-looking. It did not address the historical carbon pollution that was already heating up the world in 1991, or the devastation already absorbed by island states from sea-level rise, deforestation, disrupted fisheries, and heat.

In the years since the AOSIS proposal, other thinkers took up the Vanuatu framework and proposed more ambitious programs of recompense. In 2009, the legal scholar Maxine Burkett, who is now a White House climate adviser, made one of the first comprehensive calls for industrial states to compensate the “climate vulnerable.” For Burkett, climate vulnerability arises both from exposure to hazards such as hurricanes and sea-level rise, and from a lack of resources and resiliency to deal with those threats.

Because of the geography of colonialism, these two kinds of vulnerability often intersect. In Haiti, for example, French colonizers imported African slaves to clear-cut ancient forests, and then ruthlessly exploited the colony’s natural and human resources for generations. After the descendants of those slaves rose to power in the late 18th century during the Haitian Revolution, France imposed hefty indemnities on the new nation for the war, and centuries of isolation and intervention by the United States further eroded social and economic structures. Given its location, Haiti would always have been affected by hurricanes and sea-level rise. But the United States’ and France’s emissions have supercharged those threats, and their exploitation of Haiti has left it less capable of defending itself.

For Burkett, addressing climate change in these places requires not just loss-and-damage–style funds, but also compensation and assistance for climate disruption that has already been inflicted—true reparations. Such efforts could take different forms, with different levels of ambition. The UN could create a vehicle through which wealthy countries pledge a percentage of their GDP to developing countries. Or an individual country might heavily tax—or even nationalize—its private oil and gas industry and pledge some or all of the proceeds to its own climate-disadvantaged citizens and to neighboring countries for climate-adaptation projects. Beyond direct monetary payments, some commentators argue for no-cost installations of sustainable-energy technology and infrastructure. Writing in New York magazine in 2021, David Wallace-Wells advocated for reparations in the form of a massive investment by industrial countries in carbon-capture technology—essentially paying to reverse the historic emissions that have so devastated other nations.

But compensation is only part of reparations’ importance. Burkett argues that the very act of acknowledging a debt is key to the process as well, for the sake of both the polluter and the polluted. This acknowledgment makes clear that the global community is interested in the survival of the most imperiled states. Moral leadership by America would also put pressure on China and India, the two rising carbon powers, to acknowledge their own roles in this crisis. In the game of global opinion, at least, no country wants to look like the climate-change villain.

Perhaps the most important component of any kind of reparations is a commitment by the offender to stop offending. Embracing reparations would incentivize wealthy nations to set aggressive emissions targets and meet them. A true reparations program thus wouldn’t be an ancillary charity attached to other solutions, but the overarching climate policy itself.

This spring, weeks of torrential downpours inundated Rio Grande do Sul, a prosperous state in southern Brazil. The resulting floods were some of the worst in the country’s modern history, leaving nearly the entire state submerged. After surveying the damage, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appeared distraught. He issued a remarkable statement. “This was the third record flood in the same region of the country in less than a year,” he told The Washington Post. “We and the world need to prepare every day with more plans and resources to deal with extreme climate occurrences.” He also said that wealthy nations owed a “historic debt” to those affected by climate change.

Brazil is itself a major emitter of carbon, but it has also been a leader in pushing for a serious commitment to the loss-and-damage fund that was finally established at COP27. The United States had long been the biggest opponent to any such program, but it was outflanked by China and a group of developing countries—including Brazil—and ultimately voted for the fund.

That, however, vote came with conditions. The U.S. later pushed to establish the fund for its first four years within the World Bank, where it holds a lone veto, and also made contributions voluntary, instead of binding. My colleague Zoë Schlanger reported in 2023 that Sue Biniaz, the deputy special envoy for climate at the State Department, said she “violently opposes” arguments that developed countries have a legal obligation under the UN framework to pay into the fund. So far, the U.S. has mostly shirked responsibility, pledging only $17.5 million to the fund. (Germany, by contrast, has promised $100 million.)

[Read: Climate reparations are officially happening]

If this is the commitment the U.S. is willing to make to loss and damage, it’s difficult to imagine the country adopting a true reparations program, which would require legislation that would not pass in our currently polarized Congress, and would also be immediately reversed by any future Republican president. Yet if American policy makers somehow come back around to making actual policy, they’ll find that, far from being an extreme notion, reparations are an eminently practical one. Climate change is already prompting the movement of millions of people across borders, which in turn has led to the rise of autocratic leaders who pledge to keep those displaced peoples out. As climate change continues, the most vulnerable nations will fall first, but their collapse will not be contained. Sooner or later, the walled American garden will also wither in the heat.

An American embrace of climate reparations would create mutual obligations between disconnected hemispheres of the world, and break the climate-policy gridlock among wealthy countries. And despite the enormous cost of paying for past and future damage, those costs would be far lower than the price of failure. A recent study in Nature estimated that wealthy countries owe poorer countries a climate debt of almost $200 trillion. In 2020 and 2021, G20 countries alone allocated upwards of $14 trillion in stimulus spending to counteract the economic effects of COVID. A similar commitment to climate reparations by 2050 would address our climate debts, save millions of lives in the developing world, and give many countries a chance to adapt.

As Americans, we have a choice: to continue on our current path, or to take responsibility for our actions. For at least the immediate future, wealthy Americans will be protected from the worst of the climate crisis. This comfort is seductive, but ultimately illusory. To survive, we will have to, as the philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò says, begin to think “as ancestors.” It has proved difficult throughout history to convince Americans to engage in this kind of long-term thinking, but there have been exceptions. The Civil War gave way to an overhaul of the Constitution for posterity. The Great Depression helped birth our modern social safety net. The space race gave us the moon. Now we can choose to give our children the Earth.

This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “The Vanuatu Plan.”

The Black-History Books Teachers Hope Won’t Be Banned

2024-02-27T14:40:52-05:00

Illustrations by Diana Ejaita

Nearly a century ago, the historian Carter G. Woodson started a movement to teach Black history in America’s schools. First called Negro History Week and now Black History Month, it has been an oasis amid curricula that have too often and for too long either completely ignored Black people or treated them as subordinates. Even though Black History Month can sometimes be commemorated in ways that have turned rote and bland, many enterprising educators, librarians, and parents have used the occasion to bring stories, new interpretations of the past, and intellectual challenges to students of all ages who wouldn’t encounter them otherwise. And books have always been at the heart of their efforts.

Today, however, the books that have been deployed by adults to help in this passing on of history and sensibility are disappearing from school libraries. Led by mostly conservative lawmakers across the country, at least 12 state legislatures or school boards have formally restricted discussions and books that point to the existence of racism in America, under “critical race theory” bans; and in many districts, parents and activists have organized mass cullings of books. According to the American Library Association, 2023 appears to have been a record year for book bans and challenges, most of which targeted “books written by or about a person of color or a member of the LGBTQIA+ community.”

Every Black History Month is a fine time for book recommendations, and there are plenty of new arrivals and classics to call out this year, but in the current environment of censoriousness, I decided to ask teachers about their favorite books, and about what teaching Black history feels like in a time of book bans. Some of these teachers have already been involved in disputes involving bans. Some have not, but are still concerned. Their responses have been edited for length and clarity.

What book are you most excited about teaching for Black History Month?

In my AP language class, I began teaching Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me at the end of January, but the study will continue into February; and I love to offer James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew,” found in The Fire Next Time, and it pairs well with Coates’s narrative. In recent years, I have found some amazing current Black British writers, including Caleb Femi and Irenosen Okojie, and I love reading Okojie’s short stories with my English IV students. They are brilliant and complex displays of magical realism, which really encourage student engagement. — Mary Wood, 11th- and 12th-grade English; Chapin, South Carolina

The books I routinely teach, sometimes coinciding with Black History Month and sometimes not, are Nikki Grimes’s Bronx Masquerade, Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, the latter two of which I have started teaching through excerpts as part of reading lessons. Also, I included Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart for the first time this year. I am currently teaching Maryland Governor Wes Moore’s The Other Wes Moore. I would love the opportunity to teach Toni Morrison’s Beloved again; it’s one of my favorite books of all time. — Jackson Lee Bryant, high-school teacher; Lexington, South Carolina

I am looking forward to sharing one of my personal favorite books, Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neal Hurston. It’s a classic novel that I remember reading when I was close to their ages. Since I teach math, I do not directly teach lessons where the focal point is on literature, but I still integrate Black-history lessons during February. It is not just the responsibility of English and language-arts teachers to promote Black literature, but all educators. — Sydnee Jenkins, fifth-grade math; Nashville, Tennessee

What does Black History Month mean to you?

Black History Month has meant more to me as I’ve gotten older than it ever did when I was in school. Growing up as the son of a minister, in a Baptist church in Charlotte, North Carolina, church was always where we got information about Black History Month. In school, we were often asked the cynical question: “Why is there a Black History Month but not a White History Month?”

As a teacher, at a school where I have been the only African American in my department for the last 12 years, I realize now that those earlier experiences have given me a much deeper appreciation for my exposure to aspects of Black history. I hope in some brief way I can bring that experience to my own students. I can say, “I met some of the lunch-counter protesters from North Carolina A&T,” and it leaves me in awe. To know of my own father’s role in trying to desegregate his small North Carolina town and to see the results he achieved continues to amaze me. While Black history would be best included in the history of the United States and the world, the glaring and deliberate omissions have constantly led to the revelation of some aspect of Black history that will still seem new to some. — Maurice Thomas, high-school English and journalism; Columbia, South Carolina

Black History Month is such a proud time for my people, and I would be remiss not to appreciate and celebrate our culture, our lives, our history. Being Black is the greatest gift ever, and I acknowledge the ability that I have to even celebrate it. But at the same time, it saddens me to see what this month has become. A special time for my people to be loved out loud has turned into a month in which my people are exploited, mocked, and placated by hollow celebrations. Black History Month should be the one time a year we are able to just be ourselves, but unfortunately, it has become a farce. I love being Black. This month means something to me. I just struggle with what it was intended to be and what it has become. — Markus T. Howell, high-school English and African American literature; Upper Marlboro, Maryland

Has the political picture in America/your district changed how you approach Black History Month and the books you choose? If so, how?

Yes. The polarization of the political climate has reinvigorated me and changed how I approach Black History Month. Florida’s and other states’ rejections of Black studies and Black literature are society’s latest attempt to erase Black history. This is an attempt to silence, miseducate, and discourage. The current political picture has caused me to be more intentional in representing Black history in every aspect of teaching and learning. My classroom is decorated with a multitude of posters and biographies of distinguished Black figures, and each day we have a spotlight mini-lesson. For the entire month of February, students participate in Black-history trivia. I assign a Black-history project. This is all in an effort to ensure that we are not silenced, miseducated, or discouraged. If I can spark a conversation, or a curious mind, that might help push the needle forward, and combat the current political picture in this nation. — Sydnee Jenkins

Absolutely not. As a Black teacher of young Black and brown children, I believe it is my duty to expose the next generation to as many of our works as possible. In a society that is slowly (but not subtly) attempting to take away our access to these texts but also attempting to hide and suppress our history, I do everything possible to educate our youth. From books to art and, of course, our music, it is of the utmost importance that the youngins see how rich our history is, so that they can then do the same for the generations after them that they will lead. So much of what they see now does not exactly highlight Blackness in the most positive light, so I do my best to have them read texts from the most prolific writers—such as Toni Morrison—but also up-and-coming young Black writers who look like them as well.
— Markus T. Howell

Between the World and Me was censored in my AP language-and-composition class last February. The entire situation was heartbreaking and destructive. Some teachers may have acquiesced silently to the outlandish and unethical repudiation of the Black perspective and the interruption of instruction, and I understand why they might do that; challenging people who organize to attack education and truth is no easy feat. But I refused to back down, and I made sure that Coates’s book would be part of my curriculum for this school year.

A great many people continue to question this intention, asking why I would employ a book that has allegedly caused so much trouble for me, for my community. The fact is: That book didn’t hurt people; people hurt the book. Folks used it in a tragically defamatory manner to further a dangerous agenda of whitewashing American history and stifling Black experiences. Because of those actions, I reconciled that we must resist such efforts and organize effectively to preserve our democracy. — Mary Wood

It has definitely impacted the books I choose and how I present them. The Other Wes Moore is one that all English 2 teachers at my school use, so there is security in that choice. Other than that, I have been careful to select passages from other books, including Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time and John Edgar Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers, that I can contextualize in ways that are less likely to “offend” those white students and parents who might be looking to be offended. Thankfully, I have found these individuals to be in the minority, outside of board meetings, that is. — Jackson Lee Bryant

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The Legacy of Charles V. Hamilton and Black Power

2024-02-22T13:16:00-05:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

This week, The New York Times published news of the death of Charles V. Hamilton, the political scientist who co-wrote the book Black Power in 1967 with his much more famous colleague and comrade, Kwame Ture, once known as Stokely Carmichael. Hamilton died months ago, and the news was apparently made public only after a close friend of Hamilton’s was notified by his bank. During his life, Hamilton took great care to deflect attention and recognition for his work away from himself and toward the Black activists who learned from him. It would seem that he departed this Earth in the same way.

Now that Hamilton can no longer bat away deserved praise for his career, I hope I can offer a small tribute. Hamilton was one of the past century’s true intellectual titans and theorists of democracy. Even as a young man, he had a deep and abiding faith in democracy—and in the necessity of agitating to break America’s Jim Crow authoritarianism. He decided to enter higher education to inspire students as a self-styled “academic activist,” and was fired from the faculty of Tuskegee University for his radicalism and because of suspicions of Communist sympathies. But during his time there, he became interested in a group of students who had begun organizing on campus—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC.

During SNCC’s 1960s campaign to challenge Jim Crow, Hamilton served as a sort of older brother and academic adviser to the enfants terribles of the group. In photos, Hamilton—always in a blazer and collared shirt, always reading, already balding—is often a foil to Carmichael’s slick, militant style. The activists took to calling Hamilton “Doc” or “Doctor” to tease him. But through it all, through Freedom Summer in Mississippi, and through the Lowndes County Freedom Movement in Alabama, Hamilton and his younger comrades worked hand in hand to create a new politics that situated the plight of Black sharecroppers at the center of a global struggle for true democracy. In 1966, during the March Against Fear, Carmichael introduced the slogan “Black Power” in a speech and crystallized that new philosophy.

Just over a year later, Black Power arrived in bookstores and both scandalized and radicalized people across the country. The book, which advocated for nonviolent political change-making, was nevertheless considered so controversial that its publisher, Random House, required a disclaimer before the text, warning that the book’s framework “represents the last reasonable opportunity for this society to work out its racial problems short of prolonged destructive guerrilla warfare.” Yet many sections of Black Power have now become a part of America’s lexicon regarding race. Hamilton was one of the first theorists to use the term institutional racism in the way we use it today, and months before the Kerner Commission found that racism was the prevailing cause of riots in Black ghettos, Hamilton and Carmichael definitively stated the same. The Atlantic published an adapted excerpt from their book in the October 1967 issue, marking one of the first appearances of institutional racism in print.

In 2020, I had the great honor of striking up a Zoom correspondence with Hamilton as I reported a story on the Black struggle to create a democracy in America. The story begins with the life of my late mother, who was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, the same summer that Hamilton came to the town with SNCC to try to demand the vote. When I spoke to Hamilton, he was in his 90s and already in somewhat poor health, but even through all the hassles and scares of the early coronavirus pandemic in an assisted-living facility, he kept writing and theorizing. Hamilton was an avid politico, and when he couldn’t write, he dictated his thoughts to friends who came by—including a plan he had to draft a new pro-democracy amendment to the Constitution. In a note to me, he wrote: “Black Power opened my eyes.” And in one rare moment, he decided against his usual understatement. With Black Power, “a new period in America’s narrative was born,” he wrote. I am inclined to agree.

I’ll leave you with a few more stories from our archives involving the long intellectual lineage of Hamilton’s “Black Power”:

Revisiting America’s Most Radical Experiment

2024-02-01T13:22:00-05:00

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

It’s Black History Month again. And this February is our quadrennial Super Black History Month, where we get a whole extra leap day to squeeze in some bonus Black history. That’s roughly 4 percent more Black history than usual, more than enough time for one sitting of the 1998 NBC miniseries The Temptations. Or, if you’ve seen enough of Otis, perhaps you might spend the time reading some of The Atlantic’s archive.

Over the past few years, we at The Atlantic have been working to consider and recontextualize the magazine’s coverage of Black folks—both the places where the magazine got it right and where it didn’t. Frankly, the record has often been mixed, and the archive is thinner in many places than might be expected. But one notable moment in Black history that captured The Atlantic’s imagination was the Reconstruction era, the post–Civil War period in which Black freedpeople and their allies sought to create a truly free country.

The Atlantic was founded as an abolitionist magazine, and some of our earliest works by Black authors concerned the monumental task of Reconstruction. In these pages, the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass called for a total restructuring of society and demanded the ballot for Black men. In 1864, Charlotte Forten Grimké chronicled her work on St. Helena Island, in South Carolina, assisting freedpeople and criticizing “those who, North as well as South, taunt the colored race with inferiority while they themselves use every means in their power to crush and degrade them.”

For our December 2023 issue, “To Reconstruct the Nation,” we wanted to honor works such as these and also interpret the meaning of the Reconstruction era today, when many of the country’s biggest legal and political battles are centered on the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted in 1868 as the central Reconstruction amendment. We also wanted to examine the instances when The Atlantic fell short, including a series of 1901 articles in which prominent historians such as Woodrow Wilson lamented Reconstruction as a mistake. Ultimately, this magazine issue considered the Reconstruction era not as a distant, bygone time but as living history. The fullness of that living history offers a radical sense of possibility anchored by the dreams of Black freedpeople themselves. We could use a little of that sense of possibility today.

Your Reading List

This Ghost of Slavery

By Anna Deavere Smith

A play of past and present

Why Is America Afraid of Black History?

By Lonnie G. Bunch III

No one should fear a history that asks a country to live up to its highest ideals.

Freedmen’s Town

By Dara T. Mathis

How one photographer documented the disappearing landscape of Houston’s Fourth Ward

The Confederate General Whom All the Other Confederates Hated

By Eric Foner

James Longstreet became a champion of Reconstruction. Why?

How Reconstruction Created American Public Education

By Adam Harris

Freedpeople and their advocates persuaded the nation to embrace schooling for all.

Lost Photographs of Black America

2024-02-01T07:00:00-05:00

Photographs by Ernest Cole

Ernest Cole was born in 1940 to a Black family in the Eersterust township, near Pretoria, South Africa. As a child, he witnessed the formalization of the apartheid regime. When he was a teenager, he began working for Drum, a South African magazine geared toward Black readers. He later changed the spelling of his surname from Kole to Cole, which—along with straightening his hair—helped reclassify him as “Coloured,” a formal designation that gave him more freedom of movement in the country’s calcifying racial hierarchy. He became one of South Africa’s first Black freelance photographers, earning the ire of apartheid enforcers by capturing the human costs of the regime.

But Cole wanted to have a wider reach, and in 1966, he arrived in the United States, having smuggled enough photos out of South Africa to publish a book. House of Bondage introduced many people around the world to the horrors of apartheid. Those images of malnutrition and ritual humiliation were also the last he’d take of his country. He was soon banned from South Africa, and after sojourns in Sweden, he faded into obscurity on the streets of New York City. Cole, who died in exile in 1990, never published another book.

Then, in 2017, a member of Cole’s family was mysteriously invited to Stockholm at the behest of a Swedish bank. There, in three safety-deposit boxes, were tens of thousands of negatives, many taken during Cole’s years in America. The True America, released by Aperture in January, showcases this collection, much of which had not been previously published. Cole did not leave behind detailed information about these photos, which means that today’s viewers must infer from context what they depict. We do know that the American series began with a grant he received from the Ford Foundation to essentially replicate his work on apartheid in the urban ghettos and on the rural plantations that dominated Black American life. He must have been ambivalent about the project: Cole had come to America hoping to broaden his portfolio, and he did not want to be pigeonholed as someone who captured only oppression. Still, there’s an insurgent air about this collection. In the Black communities Cole visited in the late 1960s and early ’70s, he found people smiling, lounging, dancing, and worshipping. At a time when interracial marriage was intensely controversial, he captured a Black man and a white woman embracing on a New York subway. Cole paid attention to the media that Black people created and consumed: newspapers from the Nation of Islam, ads for Ultra Sheen Creme Satin-Press, adult magazines. He covered major historical events, traveling to Lowndes County, Alabama, during its famed freedom struggle, and to the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, on April 9, 1968. His photographs are inversions of the authoritative images ingrained in our collective memory from those moments. Cole’s world is front porches and vanity plates and processed hair: history, from below.

Cole saw South African apartheid and American institutional racism in their full power, with all of their teeth. These systems were intended to be eternal machines, creating and re-creating order for as long as each nation lasted. But Cole also bore witness to the possibility of a different outcome. Through the stoic faces of Black South African miners and the signs of Garveyites on parade in New York, he documented the people who dreamed otherwise.

Masterpieces find their moment, and the rediscovery of these photographs comes at a time when they are once again sorely needed. The historical memory of slavery and Jim Crow is under threat in America, and globally, the far right agitates for a return to white domination. The True America, as a belated bookend to House of Bondage, reinforces the interconnectedness of all forms of state oppression, and reminds us that the present always has to do with the past.

This article appears in the March 2024 print edition with the headline “Lost Photographs of Black America.”

What to Read, Watch, and Listen to Today

2024-01-15T08:00:00-05:00

In an era when many of the civil-rights policies enacted in the 1960s face serious threats, I expect there will be a renewed urgency and vigor to the annual goings-on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Below are some suggestions for how to use your downtime today.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today marks the 39th year that Martin Luther King Jr. Day has been celebrated nationally. King Day is one of those things that feels like it’s been around everywhere forever, but the federal holiday has only been recognized in every state since 2000—and, regrettably, two of those states, Alabama and Mississippi, still choose to celebrate the Confederate general Robert E. Lee alongside King, ostensibly because their birthdays are close to each other. (So far, my requests that they also consider celebrating fellow noted Capricorns Sade Adu and Ray J have gone unanswered.)

The changing meaning of Martin Luther King Jr. Day over the years is a useful barometer for the ongoing discourse on race in America. The King Day of my childhood had already been Easy-Baked into a holiday of half-hearted days of service and sappy television specials; my teachers would roll out the big TV to play Roots or Eyes on the Prize on LaserDisc. But the idea of a federal holiday to celebrate King was once fiercely contested. The late Senator John McCain voted against the original federal bill in 1983, and in 1987, the incoming governor in his home state of Arizona, Republican Evan Mecham, killed a plan to begin observing the holiday. It took five more years—and the NFL moving a Super Bowl away from the state in protest—before a referendum finally approved the measure. For years, millions of Americans were so wary of putting King on a pedestal hitherto reserved for George Washington and Christopher Columbus that they actively opposed a paid Monday off. That’s serious commitment.

Befitting all of the blood, sweat, and tears that went into the holiday’s creation, the first Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in 1986, was a big deal. As Time reported in 2017, the first observance—just two decades after the end of the civil-rights movement—was one of nationwide mass marches, candlelight vigils, and even a freedom train in California. Now, following the death of affirmative action at the hands of the Supreme Court, in an era when many of the civil-rights policies enacted in the 1960s face serious threats, I expect there will be a renewed urgency and vigor to the annual goings-on.

What’s the best way to celebrate the firefighter when the house is still burning? I’ve got a few pitches for your downtime. The Atlantic’s KING issue, released in 2018, 50 years after King’s assassination, features a wealth of speeches from King that you might not have seen, as well as essays from prominent scholars and thinkers that contemplate King’s philosophy and life. As something of a follow-up to that special issue, last winter, I helped create the podcast Holy Week, which tells the story of the week after King’s assassination—and how the most widespread unrest in America in 100 years coincided with the country’s retreat from King’s agenda.

If you can’t find the old LaserDiscs, I might suggest streaming Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power, which chronicles the fight to organize rural Black Alabamians that began immediately after the famous Selma to Montgomery marches, in 1965. It’s also not a bad time to crack open Jonathan Eig’s 2023 best-selling biography, King: A Life, or the historian Michael K. Honey’s Going Down Jericho Road, a brilliant history of the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike and King’s last days.

There also might not be a better time for turning to public spaces to learn about King and the story of Black folks in America. Atlanta houses the King Center and several historic sites related to King’s life. The National Civil Rights Museum, converted from Memphis’s Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated, still maintains the room where he was killed, exactly as it was on April 4. In Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Anacostia Community Museum, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library all offer great resources for adults and children alike. There’s a new International African American Museum in Charleston, South Carolina, and the DuSable Black History Museum, in Chicago, is hosting a day of service. Take in the history now, before it’s gone.

Related:

Today’s Read

(Don Cravens / The Life Images Collection / Getty; Bettmann / Getty)

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail”

By Martin Luther King Jr.

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities “unwise and untimely.” Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against “outsiders coming in” … Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct-action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here.

Read the full article.

Civil Rights Undone

2023-12-07T06:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

Lee este artículo en español.

In late 2020, even as the instigators of insurrection were marshaling their followers to travel to Washington, D.C., another kind of coup—a quieter one—was in the works. On December 21, in one of his departing acts as attorney general, Bill Barr submitted a proposed rule change to the White House. The change would eliminate the venerable standard used by the Justice Department to handle discrimination cases, known as “disparate impact.” The memo was quickly overshadowed by the events of January 6, and, in the chaotic final days of Donald Trump’s presidency, it was never implemented. But Barr’s proposal represented perhaps the most aggressive step the administration took in its effort to dismantle existing civil-rights law. Should Trump return to power, he would surely attempt to see the effort through.

Since the legislative victories of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, legal and civil rights for people on the margins have tended to expand. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were followed by voting provisions for Indigenous people and non-English speakers, a Supreme Court guarantee of the right to abortion, increased protections for people with disabilities, and formal recognition of same-sex marriage. The trend mostly continued under presidents of both parties—until Trump. Though his administration could be bumbling, the president’s actions matched his rhetoric when it came to eroding civil-rights enforcement.

[From the March 2021 issue: American democracy is only 55 years old—and hanging by a thread]

Under Trump, the Justice Department abandoned its active protection of voting rights. The Environmental Protection Agency ignored civil-rights complaints. The Department of Housing and Urban Development scaled back investigations into housing discrimination. Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court, for their part, have whittled away at landmark civil-rights legislation and presided over the end of affirmative action.

In a second term, the most effective way for Trump to continue rolling back protections would be to dismantle disparate-impact theory. Under the theory, the federal government can prohibit discriminatory practices not just in instances of malicious and provable bigotry, but also in cases where a party’s actions unintentionally affect a class of marginalized people disproportionately.

The theory is important because discrimination can be perpetuated without ill intent; even seemingly benign or neutral policies can perpetuate a legacy of bias, or create new inequities. But disparate impact is also essential because landlords, business owners, and municipal officials who do wish to discriminate have learned how to operate without expressing overt bigotry. Under disparate impact, the government’s burden is not to prove that these actors intended to discriminate, only that their actions resulted in discrimination.

For decades, lawyers have invoked disparate impact as a means of fighting discrimination. The standard has been applied across the federal government. After the housing crisis of 2008, the DOJ brought a series of lawsuits against banks that had charged higher mortgage rates and fees to minority borrowers, winning hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements from the lenders. In 2015, the DOJ released a damning report on the practices of the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, after an 18-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, was shot and killed by a police officer. Disparate impact was mentioned at least 30 times in the report, including in its main takeaway: “African Americans experience disparate impact in nearly every aspect of Ferguson’s law enforcement system.”

[Adam Serwer: Trump is making it easier to get away with discrimination]

Many conservatives have long been suspicious of disparate impact. The most principled objections center on the claims that it invites government overreach and inefficiency, that it impedes state and local policy development, and that it always entails some degree of ghost-chasing—in a country as unequal as America, discerning what exactly contributes to a disparate outcome can be difficult.

But these philosophical and practical objections to the theory have always served to disguise a more visceral disdain. Many conservatives simply believe that ensuring equality is not a legitimate federal priority. In the Trump era, as the Republican Party has embraced white nationalism, its leaders have been emboldened to abandon the guise. They edge closer to the line once held by the architects of Jim Crow: Equality is undesirable because people are not equals; some of us might not even be people.

Trump himself has always had a preternatural gift for identifying and channeling grievance; white backlash against civil-rights legislation was one of the major forces behind his advancement to the presidency, and that backlash can be traced directly to disdain for civil-rights legislation and enforcement. Once Trump was in office, one of his early targets was HUD. In 2020, the department finalized a rule that demolished its discriminatory-effect standard, which had been the basis for enforcement at the department for at least 40 years. Trump’s HUD secretary, Ben Carson, said that the move would spur efficiency at the local level without undermining the department’s antidiscrimination work. But Carson has long been a skeptic of desegregation; during his 2016 presidential campaign, he described desegregation efforts in cities as “failed socialist experiments.” Ultimately, Carson’s attempt to undermine the discrimination standard was stymied by lawsuits. But the cause of fighting bias suffered nevertheless. In 2020, at the end of Carson’s tenure, the number of secretary-initiated complaints had gone from several dozen in 2015 to three.

Trump did serious damage to disparate impact as president; there’s little question that he would finish the job if given another chance. A second Trump administration could go beyond simply abandoning the theory, perhaps even bringing lawsuits seeking to declare the entire concept unconstitutional. Trump could thus attack civil-rights law from both sides, sabotaging the government’s capability to adjudicate cases while also arguing that it should not have that capability in the first place. If this two-pronged strategy succeeds, it will be difficult for any future administration to undo the changes. With today’s conservative-dominated judiciary and high levels of political polarization, any substantive changes Trump makes to civil-rights enforcement could effectively become permanent.

Without disparate impact, the DOJ would lose its primary tool for addressing brutality in police departments, and current efforts to finally enforce environmental laws in communities of color and hold cities accountable for creating slums in Black and Latino neighborhoods would be stalled. Given the damage that has already been done by the courts, there is a future—perhaps a likely future—in which the remaining foundations of the civil-rights era are undone. If Trump were to win in 2024, he would see the victory as a mandate to tear everything down now.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Civil Rights Undone.”

How the Negro Spiritual Changed American Popular Music—And America Itself

2023-11-13T05:55:00-05:00

Photo-illustrations by Gabriela Pesqueira

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “On Reconstruction,” a project about America’s most radical experiment.

One of the treasures of Black history is preserved in a plain gray box, stashed away in a quiet room. In Nashville one morning, as the Fisk University campus shimmered in the summer heat, I walked into the archives of the Franklin Library to see it: a collection of papers from just after the Civil War about the founding of the university and others like it. I put on a pair of white cloth gloves to handle the pages. The stories I read in the collection were real, but they also felt to me like cosmology, recounting the beginnings of Black institutions I love and the arduous labors and journeys of the people who made them. The world described in the archive seemed especially malleable: open to possibility, and open to being shaped according to the hopes of the Black people in it.

One story in particular stood out, from the diary of a young woman named Ella Sheppard. In the summer of 1871, she was stuck waiting for a train home, in a hotel somewhere in the middle of Tennessee. She was traveling with a group of students, also Black, back to Nashville after singing at a concert in Memphis. Traveling in the South was dangerous for any Black person, let alone for a coed group of students making their way through the state where the Ku Klux Klan had recently been founded.

According to Sheppard’s diary, the presence of the Black singers did indeed attract attention. A mob of local white men, engaged in what another source euphemistically described as “electioneering,” began to threaten the students. As Sheppard recalled in her diary, the troupe left the hotel with the mob still in tow and walked to the railroad stop, where the choir began to sing a hymn. The mob melted away. As the train approached, Sheppard wrote, only the leader of the mob remained. He “begged us with tears falling to sing the hymn again.”

The group did not yet have renown or even a name, but the encounter at the train stop was an omen. In time, the choir would become the world-famous Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the diary written by Sheppard, who served as the group’s pianist and composer, preserves its origin story. Beyond that, the diary, and the other documents in that gray box, offer a founding story of the university itself. And they explain how the Negro spiritual went from being “slave music” to one of the most popular genres in America. Considered solely as cultural artifacts, the collection at Fisk—the delicate manuscripts, the brittle newspaper clippings, the photographs, the musical arrangements—is a marvel.

In my hands, I also held crucial insights into the radical possibilities of Reconstruction, a period of American history that has been purposefully warped and misunderstood for generations. In the process of revealing and restoring—and understanding—the actual truth about that era, we might also glimpse a new opportunity for ourselves. We might even again pick up the project of reshaping the world.

In his foundational work, The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois devotes the last essay to “sorrow songs,” or Negro spirituals. He describes spirituals as radical folk music, their very existence a rebuttal to the notion that Black people were too primitive to hold political rights. Du Bois was himself a proud alumnus of Fisk University, and no stranger to the archive. In the essay, he provided a capsule history of “the pilgrimage of the Fisk Jubilee Singers.” It began shortly after the train-stop incident.

The year 1871 was a crucible. Six years after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, the true terms of peace were still being negotiated—especially insofar as freedpeople were concerned. By 1871, Republicans in Congress had managed to have the states ratify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The 11 rebel states had been readmitted to the Union. Buoyed by the votes of Black men, five Black representatives held congressional seats. Congress had created a Department of Justice and given it a mandate to destroy the Ku Klux Klan. Fisk and dozens of other institutions, many of them supported by the Freedmen’s Bureau, had sprung up to educate Black students of all ages. They formed the nucleus of what we know today as historically Black colleges and universities. (My father recently served as the president of Fisk.)

But the revolution was faltering. Many northern white Republicans had grown weary of the constant federal oversight required to protect the rights of Black people in the former Confederate states. Their attention, and the nation’s, had turned west, to the country’s expansion and the bloody dispossession of the Indigenous people who lived there. The Freedmen’s Bureau would come to a formal end in 1872, but its efforts were already effectively exhausted. Meanwhile, former Confederates tallied rolling successes in their “redemption” of southern governments—restoring themselves to power through violence and fraud.

It was in this environment that Fisk University’s choir—10 students, ranging in age from 14 to their early 20s—took to the road. Several singers had been born into slavery; one, Benjamin Holmes, had read the Emancipation Proclamation aloud to those imprisoned with him in a slave pen in 1863.

They’d undertaken their journey in order to save their fledgling school. Fisk University had been founded in 1866 with the support of the American Missionary Association, an abolitionist organization that turned its energies to educating freedpeople after the war. But, with the primary objective of abolition met, donations dwindled. Fisk was one of several normal schools and universities that the AMA was now struggling to support. Campus conditions were miserable. Sheppard recalled in her diary that, in cold weather, students shivered through the night in substandard housing, with barely any protection from the elements. They subsisted on food that was nearly inedible. The situation at Fisk was a microcosm of Black life in the South: unprecedented promise and potential oblivion living under the same crumbling roof.

George L. White, a white former Freedmen’s Bureau official and Fisk’s treasurer, was aware of the dire circumstances. The future of the institution was in peril—as was the entire project of educating freedpeople in the South. But White had an idea: He believed that the small choir he’d founded could help save Fisk. He and Sheppard had constantly drilled the singers, taking time to practice whenever the group’s studies allowed. The concert in Memphis had showcased their talent, and perhaps the performance at the train stop had ordained their purpose.

White proposed a tour through the North, hoping to raise a sum of $20,000—about $500,000 today. Most of the prospective audiences for these benefit concerts would be white: The director hoped to astonish them with the choir’s polish, and to rekindle the abolitionist fervor that had financially supported Fisk in its infancy.

Fisk’s faculty, and the parents of its students, thought White’s scheme was ridiculous. They called it a “wild-goose chase” and pointed to the real dangers that a group of young Black students would face on the road. The AMA actively discouraged the tour, worried that a poor showing might, in fact, impede fundraising efforts. In an act of disobedience, White drew funds from the school’s meager treasury, and the singers set out for Ohio.

The word reconstruction first brings to mind the idea of reconstituting what was, exactly as it was. Buildings may be reconstructed after disasters to the same specifications as before, defying the calamities that felled them. Ultimately the South was reconstructed in this way, with racial domination and labor exploitation as its foundation.

But reconstruction can mean something else, too. The word can connote taking the old and making it new, taking rupture and rubble as opportunities to fix fundamental faults, or to create new edifices altogether. For the span of just over a decade, America tried this definition on in starts and stops, attempting to fashion a truly new nation from the wreckage of the Civil War. The Fisk University singers were part of that effort, attesting to the truth that Reconstruction was not and never could be ended by the hand of the federal government.

As Du Bois wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, and as Sheppard recounted in her diary, the early going for the singers was miserable, and dangerous. Lynchings and wholesale pogroms of Black communities were so common as to be unremarkable in the South, and threats of violence did not stop once Black people arrived in the North. According to the Fisk history, the students also faced the ire of white people who “spelled negro with two g’s.” White crowds often ridiculed the singers, and the group was regularly denied accommodation in white establishments. As the Fisk history has it, “The world was as unfamiliar to these untraveled freed people as were the countries through which the Argonauts had to pass; the social prejudices that confronted them were as terrible to meet as fire-breathing bulls or the warriors that sprang from the land sown with dragons’ teeth.”

The singers tried to take things in stride. It was never lost on them that every tour stop was history made. When Sheppard was an infant, her own mother had been bound to the land, and was sold away from her like nothing more than livestock. The fact that, at 20, Sheppard could freely take a train to the North was at once ordinary and revolutionary.

For their early performances—in Nashville, Memphis, and Cincinnati—the singers mostly pulled from a repertoire of standard popular songs designed to showcase their equality with white choirs and to impress any sophisticates in the audience. This was no small thing. The belief in the intellectual, moral, cultural, and evolutionary inferiority of freedpeople was pervasive among even white liberals in 1871. Just three years earlier, the editors of the Philadelphia-based Lippincott’s Magazine had argued against the proposition that “the negro, in his native state, knows what music is,” and ascribed any facility in music among Black people to clever mimicry or traces of white ancestry. According to Andrew Ward, the author of Dark Midnight When I Rise, a history of the Fisk University singers, the main interaction that most white northerners had with what they believed to be Black culture was the buffoonery of minstrelsy, mostly performed by white entertainers in blackface.

The choir found itself caught between white apathy and white hostility. At several venues, the singers barely sold enough tickets to cover their costs. In Chillicothe, Ohio, where George White used to teach, they drew enough of a crowd to instill hope of earning some money. But before they performed, they learned that the Great Fire, on October 8, had destroyed much of Chicago. They donated all of their proceeds from that night—less than $50—to victims of the fire.

The autumn stretched on. White prayed for deliverance. He declared that the singers should take the name Jubilee after the year in the biblical cycle whose arrival was celebrated by the manumission of slaves and the absolution of debts.

A new way forward for what was now the Fisk Jubilee Singers presented itself during a concert one night in Oberlin, Ohio. Mostly in private, the singers had been practicing a new repertoire, songs that the majority of white people had never heard. They cobbled together snatches of work songs and “sorrow songs” that many of the students, or their parents, had learned in the fields while enslaved. The minister and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson had written in the pages of this magazine about his experience of the Negro spirituals sung by Black soldiers during his time as a Union officer, calling them “a stimulus to courage and a tie to heaven.” But, for the songs they sang, there were no songbooks to work from. White, Sheppard, and the singers wrote much of the music down for the first time, helping formalize the genre as they went.

[From the June 1867 issue: Negro spirituals]

Sheppard noted in her diary that the singers harbored a deep ambivalence about even practicing spirituals in private. The songs “were associated with slavery and the dark past, and represented the things to be forgotten,” she wrote. Spirituals were imbued with the pain and the shame of bondage, which several of the Fisk singers knew firsthand. The songs were also considered sacred. To some, putting lyrics to paper or accompaniment meant stripping the spirit from the spirituals. Even in front of the small, mostly Black crowds that the choir had entertained before setting out on tour, the spirituals had been mixed in sparsely.

Ella Sheppard, the pianist and composer for the Fisk Jubilee Singers (Photo-illustration by Gabriela Pesqueira. Source: New York Public Library.)

But that night in Oberlin, the Jubilee Singers did something different. As guests of a meeting of the National Council of Congregational Churches, they were given an opportunity to perform. Among the songs that they chose was “Steal Away,” one of the spirituals in their repertoire. The song begins with a plaintive call to “steal away,” which is then echoed by the choir. The song’s quiet opening lyrics eventually swell with force to deliver “the trumpet sounds in my soul.” The Jubilee Singers had announced themselves with thunder. As The Cincinnati Daily Enquirer wrote on November 17, “They sung with such effect that the scrip was as abundant as the applause, a market basket full of money being taken for the University.”

The praise from the choir’s Oberlin performance helped them earn the notice of Henry Ward Beecher, an immensely influential abolitionist and preacher who had once sent rifles to John Brown’s antislavery guerrillas in Kansas. Beecher invited the group to sing for his congregation in Brooklyn.

Traveling to the event, the singers knew that it would likely be their last chance to prove themselves and save the university. They expected Beecher’s congregation to be a friendly crowd. The same church had backed Beecher’s most extreme forays into abolition and had hosted escaped and former slaves before. But the singers also knew that even the expectations of friendly crowds could be misshapen by prejudice.

They chose to begin the Brooklyn concert with a dramatic innovation: singing from the church balcony, obscured from the crowd by a curtain, their spectral voices filling the nave. And they chose to lead with “Steal Away,” the spiritual that had gotten them to Brooklyn in the first place. According to Fisk’s account of the Jubilee Singers, “So soft was their beginning that the vast audience looked around to see whence came this celestial music. Gradually louder and even louder the voices rose—to a glorious crescendo—and then back down to a mere whisper, ‘I ain’t got long to stay here.’ ” As they sang, the curtain was pulled back to reveal their faces. The audience’s reception was rapturous: “They clamored for more—would not let the singers cease.” Donations poured in. Beecher blessed the spirituals, though with an unfortunate image: “Only they can sing them who know how to keep time to a master’s whip.”

Ultimately, the Jubilee Singers became one of the most famous performing acts in the world. They toured through 1872, capturing the attention of both Black and white audiences. Their domestic success launched them abroad. They sang for Queen Victoria and for Kaiser Wilhelm I. In the end, George L. White’s “wild-goose chase” raised not $20,000 but almost $100,000.

The tour saved Fisk University. But more than that, it preserved an art form. Spirituals such as “Steal Away” became the core of the Jubilee Singers’ performances, and this expanding repertoire became the basis for the songbook of standards that still graces Black churches today. The spirituals captured the imagination of post-abolition literati. Mark Twain became something of a Jubilee Singers groupie, attending several shows to experience the music that he called “the perfectest flower of the ages.”

Some white listeners came just for the music; some came for the spectacle; some claimed that the Jubilee Singers’ spirituals had made them more sympathetic to “the plight of the Negro.” But their reactions were secondary to what the new prominence of the form meant for the people who’d made it. After one show in Washington, D.C., the Jubilee Singers were thrilled to have an audience with Frederick Douglass, then the most famous Black man in America. He told the singers: “You are doing more to remove the prejudice against our race than ten thousand platforms could do.” He was so taken by the young people from Fisk that he sang for them “Run to Jesus,” a spiritual that he’d learned as a child. The singers transcribed his song on the spot, adding it to the songbook. In a playbill for a later concert, promoting the new song, the Jubilee singers wrote: “Thus, under the influence of this song, he at last gained his freedom, and the world gained Frederick Douglass.”

The golden age of the Jubilee Singers was brief. Sheppard, the pianist and composer, had endured chronic illness even before the tour. Exhausted by the group’s barnstorming, White and several other members also took ill. As white supremacists in the South steadily destroyed Black civil rights, and as the North lost interest in protecting those rights, traveling as a Black coed group grew too dangerous. In 1877, when Congress officially ended Reconstruction—ratifying the deal that gave Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency and effectively withdrew federal troops from the South—the goings-on at Black universities were no longer considered by most liberal white people to be matters of their concern. With the coming of Jim Crow, institutions such as Fisk would form a network of care for Black folk—places where the true possibilities of Reconstruction could be preserved, even if neglected by the rest of America. The Jubilee Singers have been part of this effort; they still perform at concerts across the country.

But Negro spirituals went on to change the country as a whole. In America’s fragmented antebellum culture, before the advent of true mass media, the closest thing to “national music” had been the traveling farce of minstrel shows. Yet during Reconstruction, both the live performance and sheet music of Negro spirituals exploded in popularity. Spirituals prefigured the rise of the blues—a direct successor—as the first truly national popular music. The Black writer and activist James Weldon Johnson, writing in 1925, called spirituals “America’s only folk music and, up to this time, the finest distinctive contribution she has to offer the world.”

Through the efforts of the freedpeople themselves, the songs that had sustained them in the fields became a national art form. This transformation was not without cost. It wouldn’t be long before Black music was co-opted by white musicians and consumers. The early radio recordings of spirituals were often performed by white singers, and marketed to white audiences. For much of white society, the spiritual was the music of the freedpeople—minus the freedpeople.

For this reason, many radical Black scholars later considered the preservation and proliferation of the spiritual to be the ultimate capitulation—a sacred piece of Black culture saved only by performing it for people who largely thought that Black culture was unworthy.

Maybe there is another conclusion. After all, the spiritual was always meant to be performed in public, in full view of the overseer’s watchful eyes. But beneath the surface, the lyrics and rhythms of spirituals carried messages among the enslaved about kinship, about love, about daily life, about the freedom of the “promised land,” and even about rebellion. Insubordinate messages persisted precisely because, like the editors of Lippincott’s Magazine, the overseers believed that Black culture was counterfeit, and that the people chopping cotton in the fields could not turn words into effective weapons. The insurgency of the spiritual always relied on white consumption. It was the poison in the master’s tea.

Today, the legacy of Reconstruction most often surfaces in its legal consequences. The Fourteenth Amendment, in particular, has been the subject of major recent Supreme Court rulings on voting rights and abortion rights—the concept of equal protection under the law has never ceased being contentious. But the story of the Fisk Jubilee Singers shows that the Constitution was not the only aspect of America subject to renegotiation during Reconstruction. The singers had set out to perform popular white music, in the main, but they soon found purpose in remaking American music in their own image. The same was true of every other element of life into which freedpeople entered. Throughout Reconstruction, societal assumptions—about labor relations, gender roles, the makeup of families, the means and ends of education, and much else—were in flux across the country, driven by the efforts of emancipated Black people in the South.

Experiments in new ways of living propagated wherever Black people pressed feet to earth. “Freedmen’s towns” flourished across the South, with all manner of governance. Would-be utopias winked in and out of existence. In coastal South Carolina, freedpeople soon became the majority of farm operators on the Sea Islands. There, they resisted guidance from the Freedmen’s Bureau (and the hopes of their former enslavers), rejecting the local market economy in favor of building spontaneous pastoral communes out of former plantations, and growing crops for subsistence instead of the market.

Across the South, freedpeople reconstituted families pulled apart on the auction block, but did so along much looser kinship lines than the nuclear family unit. In Savannah, Georgia, Black women amassed tracts of land in their own names to pass on to their children. Many freedpeople forsook the surnames of their enslavers, or even the first names they’d been given. Renaming was often an act of both radical purpose and plain descriptiveness: Freeman remains a common last name today.

In music and otherwise, it was clear that the main goal of Reconstruction—as it existed in the hearts and minds of the people being reconstructed—was not to leave the country as it was, but to shake the foundations of possibility. It was in this pliable reality that the Fisk Jubilee Singers began to make their mark.

The potency of spirituals and their insurgent history were clear to Du Bois. He tried to make his case, often writing in publications that endorsed the bigotry—sometimes clothed, sometimes naked—of his white contemporaries. In 1901, as a young scholar still relatively new to the white literary scene, Du Bois wrote for a series on Reconstruction in The Atlantic. Alongside skeptical essays from the historian William A. Dunning (who founded the school of American history that claimed the policy of making Black people citizens was a mistake) and Woodrow Wilson (who argued that freedpeople had not been fit to vote), Du Bois wrote, “The granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race.”

[From the December 2023 issue: What The Atlantic got wrong about Reconstruction]

In his essay, Du Bois helped begin a slow reckoning with history that continues today. He did so not merely through his own insight and intellect, but through the revolutionary act of taking the freedpeople and their ambitions seriously—by describing what they wanted from Reconstruction.

For most of the past century, that history of possibility and Black self-determination during Reconstruction was considered too dangerous to teach. Du Bois’s own work on the topic was ignored by white historians as long as he lived, and textbooks inspired by Dunning littered classrooms in the South (and the North) even during my own childhood. To this day, the most famous and widely seen depiction of ostensible Black life during Reconstruction might be the racist 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, the D. W. Griffith epic that portrays Klansmen as heroes saving the South from Black savages and was endorsed by Wilson during his time as president. That fact suggests just how much the real story of Black Reconstruction has been obliterated from the public eye.

A growing movement on the right today again finds the history obscured by Wilson, Dunning, and the rest to be too inconvenient or perilous for schools and libraries. Agitation against depictions of Black history and agency is often grounded in the claim that it unfairly makes white people of the present feel guilty for the sins of the past. But that might just be cover for the real reason. Perhaps the true danger of Black history—especially of the era when the formerly enslaved seized and shaped their freedom—is that it shows us that there are more and better possibilities than the present.

That was the fundamental message of most spirituals, and of the sacred code of the promised land. That message is kept in a box of documents in a campus library. Even when salvation seems beyond reach, it may still be in our own hands.

In late August 2022, I walked into a building full of people in Drew, Mississippi. Folding chairs had been crammed everywhere they could be crammed, from the bathroom hallway to the front doors. We had all gathered there for a belated memorial service for Emmett Till, the boy brutally lynched in that very town by white men in 1955. Local citizens, dignitaries, schoolchildren, journalists—everyone was packed together.

After the processional, after the greetings and prayers, the Valley Singers of Mississippi Valley State University took the floor. They began a rendition of “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” written by James Weldon Johnson and set to music by his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson, in 1900. The first two verses of the song evoke the trials of Blackness in the past and present. The choir sang Johnson’s lyrics with triumph, their voices filling the space.

Johnson was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1871, the same year the Jubilee Singers set out on their tour. Their story inspired his own work cataloging and interpreting spirituals; he dedicated his first book on spirituals to “those through whose efforts these songs have been collected, preserved, and given to the world.” The history of the Jubilee Singers had been important to him. The lyrics and composition of his own anthem were inflected by the spirituals they rescued.

To Johnson, the revival of the spiritual “marked a change in the attitude of the Negro himself toward his own art material; the turning of his gaze inward upon his own cultural resources.” In his view, those cultural resources were themselves the power to build, and not just imitate—to shape a world. The song we all heard in that hot room in Mississippi was a tribute to a legacy that allowed us to be there in the first place.

Sweat dripped down my face as the singers brought the song home. The final verse slowed down to a quiet, piercing prayer. And then, a final, exulting march: “Shadowed beneath Thy hand / May we forever stand.” Even in that room, blanketed in Mississippi heat, I felt chills.

This article appears in the December 2023 print edition with the headline “The Years of Jubilee.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Holy Week: Resurrection

2023-03-14T06:00:00-04:00

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Reporter: The Poor People’s Campaign is more than six weeks old now. And the poor that Dr. Martin Luther King wanted to bring to Washington have come. The Blacks, the whites, the Puerto Ricans, the Mexican Americans, and Indians. More than 3,000 of them have come from across the country. And as Dr. King had dreamed, they built a shantytown to expose the nation’s shame. They call it Resurrection City.

(Group singing: “… This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine …”)

Vann R. Newkirk II: The thing people seem to remember best about Resurrection City is the rain.

(Group singing: “… Lord, which side are you on? Well, you can tell that God above …”)

Newkirk: A month after King was killed, Ralph David Abernathy and Coretta Scott King followed through with their promise to continue his plan. Thousands of people came to D.C. People took buses and even mule carts up from Mississippi and Alabama. From Memphis, the Invaders, the last group to meet with King, sent their own delegation. John Burl Smith didn’t make it, but one of his deputies, a man called Sweet Willie Wine, went instead.

Sweet Willie Wine: I brought a militant group here. We have become nonviolent to a certain extent. But don’t mean just because he’s dead that it’s going to stop progress. It won’t stop me from thinking as I think. Because each time these people die—these leaders that is going to help, the poor people die—you know it makes me that much more mad, and makes me go out to recruit more people for my purposes.

Newkirk: The people started building shacks and tents on the National Mall on Mother’s Day, and they were ready for the heat of May and June in D.C. But then one day, it just started raining, and it didn’t stop.

Matthew Nimetz: There was mud and storms and the little kids there. And it was a real mess.

Newkirk: Matthew Nimetz was one of the staffers the White House named as a liaison to Resurrection City. He was the young guy in the White House. He’d done everything from trying to squash reports for President Johnson to organizing the meeting with civil-rights leaders the day after King was killed. So then he got this job.

Nimetz: We knew that these people were arriving, and we got reports they were coming, and there were these mules, and where would the mules go? I had to deal with the mules and try to find a farm for them, you know.

Newkirk: When King was alive, President Johnson had opposed his plan to stage the Poor People’s Campaign. The White House still didn’t love the idea after his death. They had just worked magic to pass the Fair Housing Act, against serious opposition. But the people in Resurrection City were challenging the president, demanding more—always more.

Resurrection City speaker: We’re here because there’s a lot of problems that has to be dealt with in this country. We’re here because little children are standing around in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia poverty-stricken, without food to eat. We’re here because most of the Black people in those states do not have adequate housing.They do not have education. That’s why we’re here. [Applause.]

Newkirk: The purpose of Resurrection City was in the name. If Black folks couldn’t bring back King, the man, then they could maybe bring back his spirit. They wanted to reiterate his call to transform America. They wanted to influence the presidential election and find a leader who could continue Johnson’s civil-rights legacy. When people took their mule carts up from the South in May, they hoped that this would be a new beginning.

Ralph David Abernathy: We are the people who come up out of great trials and tribulations. The death of Martin Luther King could not stop us. I am here to tell you today that certainly nothing that the Congress of the United States of America, and the policemen and the National Guard, or any other force can do here in Washington will stop us, because we have made up in our mind that we’re going to let nobody turn us around.

Newkirk: But that hope proved fleeting.

Harry Reasoner (journalist): A new white backlash is plainly visible in the country. The lead story in today’s Wall Street Journal is headed, “Ghetto Violence Brings Hardening of Attitudes Toward Negro Gains.”

Charles Kuralt (journalist): CBS News commissioned a poll, which attempted to measure racial attitudes in the United States statistically.

Newkirk: Shortly after the signing of the Fair Housing Act, journalists and pollsters tried to assess just how much the riots had moved white attitudes about civil rights and racial equality. CBS reported on a poll conducted during the Poor People’s Campaign.

Reporter: Fourteen percent of whites now believe that housing for Negro families in all-white communities is a good idea.

Reporter: Just about half of whites in our survey said the Negro has not made more progress because he has not worked hard enough. Only 15 percent blame discrimination. Some had no opinion.

Newkirk: The most-pronounced shifts in white opinions had come, unsurprisingly, on the matter of riots.

Hal Walker (journalist): More than a third of whites say that when a riot occurs, it would be a good idea for police to shoot one or two rioters as examples to the rest.

Man 1: Shoot to kill. If they’re old enough to violate laws, shoot ’em. If it’s my own kid, I’d say shoot them. He deserves it. He should obey laws. There’s laws for us. There’s laws for Negroes. Let them start obeying them.

Man 2: There was a riot. They had signs all over—soul brother—made no difference. They robbed, raped, plundered, looted their own people.

Woman 1: They should be shot. That’s the only way we can stop them.

Newkirk: It was not an encouraging sign as a massive event like the Poor People’s Campaign was being held in Washington D.C., a city where riots had just recently erupted. What was worse, although Abernathy and the movement were recommitted to nonviolence, the majority of white folks opposed even peaceful protest.

Walker: We found when it comes to ways for the Negro to protest for what he wants, most whites are against Negro picketing or boycotting. In fact against anything other than holding a protest meeting.

Newkirk: Things were already just as bad on the political front.

Richard Nixon: When a nation with the greatest tradition of the rule of law is torn apart by lawlessness …

Newkirk: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had been trying to out “law and order” each other to win the Republican nomination for president.

Nixon: … then I say it’s time for new leadership in the United States of America.

Ronald Reagan: The government’s function is to protect society from the lawbreaker and not the other way around.

Newkirk: George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, was running as a third-party candidate and had been holding rallies as far north as Maryland and New York.

George Wallace: If you go out of this building tonight and somebody knocks you in the head, the person who knocks you in the head is out of jail before you get to the hospital. And on Monday morning, they will try the policeman. [Applause.]

Newkirk: In the Democratic primary, Black voters had latched on to the hope of electing Robert F. Kennedy. He had criticized the administration for not doing enough to implement the Kerner Commission’s recommendations. His wife, Ethel Kennedy, marched with Coretta Scott King during the Poor People’s Campaign. But then, just after winning the California primary, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated.

Andy West (journalist): Senator Kennedy has been shot. Is that possible? Is that possible? Is it possible, ladies and gentlemen? It is possible he has. Not only Senator Kennedy—oh, my God—Senator Kennedy has been shot.

Newkirk: Kennedy’s funeral procession stopped by Resurrection City on the way to burying him at Arlington Cemetery. A little more than three weeks after the Poor People’s Campaign first broke ground on the National Mall, they vowed to keep going, even as trash piled up and sewage ran into the mud in the shanties they built. But it was all just blow after blow. And the rain kept coming down.

C. Gerald Fraser (journalist): There is little doubt that the campaign has lost its momentum. Instead, the organization has been bogged down with problems overrunning Resurrection City, a task that has proved larger than most staffers would have believed.

Newkirk: Two weeks after that, their permit to stage the demonstration expired. The authorities shut Resurrection City down.

Matthew Nimetz: People like me were sympathetic, but we were realists. We knew we couldn’t change the country immediately. And then, in fact, things were going the wrong way.

Newkirk: There were not a whole lot of happy endings for Resurrection City. People went home exhausted, both from weeks of life in the tents and from the emotional letdown of tragedy after tragedy.

Some of them went back to Chicago, to Pittsburgh, to Baltimore, to neighborhoods and districts where police were still on edge, waiting for the next wave of riots. They took trains and planes and buses down south, where old Jim Crow was still fighting his best to hold on. They went to Memphis, where the Invaders were still trying their best to hold on to revolution. They went back to homes in D.C., walking past ruins where whole blocks used to be.

Even in real time, it all felt like a conclusion, like the end of a chapter of American history. But for the people leaving Resurrection City, and for the communities they went back to, trauma and grief didn’t have such neat endings, if they ended at all.

***

Newkirk: Part 8: “Resurrection.”

***

Newkirk: Last fall, John Burl Smith drove us out to his sister’s home, near Memphis. He likes to talk with both of his hands while driving, so I was already happy to be there. I was even happier when he opened the door and introduced me to his 102-year-old mother, Willie Mae Smith-Gray.

John Burl Smith: Hey, sweetheart.

Willie Mae Smith-Gray: I was worried about you.

Burl Smith: I’m doing fine. You’re my hero. [Laughter.] So I tell everybody about you. This is Vann.

Smith-Gray: Vance?

Burl Smith: Vann.

Smith-Gray: Vann?

Burl Smith: Vann, Vann …

Smith-Gray: Vann?

Newkirk: Yes, ma’am.

Burl Smith: Like Tommy’s daughter. Vann. V-A-N

Smith-Gray: Okay.

Newkirk: Nice to meet you.

Burl Smith: And this is Ethan.

Smith-Gray: Nice to meet him.

Newkirk: It’s been almost 55 years since John and the Invaders had their last meeting with Martin Luther King in room 306. I’d been talking to John for months about that meeting, but I want to know more about those 55 years, about what he carries with him, even now.

Burl Smith: Oh, let me get that.

Newkirk: John and I pulled some chairs into a back bedroom and talked.

Newkirk: I’m curious. Does this change the mission for the Invaders in the time after the assassination? You had a vision of the future for yourselves. What do you do next?

Burl Smith: Well … there were several events that happened.

Newkirk: There certainly were several events. A week after King’s funeral, the Memphis sanitation workers had finally gotten recognition by the city as a union, and they went back to work. John and his comrades sent a delegation up to D.C. for the Poor People’s Campaign, but they still tried to keep Black Power alive in Memphis. They were working with anti-poverty programs, giving out school lunches and breakfasts. John saw himself as a protector for Black kids around the city. He didn’t live too far from Carver High School, where a lot of the young Invaders were enrolled.

Burl Smith: The kids were being thrown out of school for wearing afros and Afro-centric dress, demanding Black history in their classes and Black books in the library and things like that. And they were suspending kids for that.

Newkirk: One day, John says he and the Invaders were visiting Carver to recruit kids for a local Black-theater program. Then they heard a commotion coming from the general-purpose room.

Burl Smith: And this particular day, they pulled the fire alarm and emptied the school. But the principal called the police. And when the police came, they were chasing the kids with blackjacks and things like that. And one of the police there recognized me as an Invader, and they arrested me.

Newkirk: Did you have the Invader jacket on?

Burl Smith: No. They arrested me for disorderly conduct.

Newkirk: The FBI’s COINTELPRO program was watching the indictment closely. They were keeping tabs on the Invaders, sabotaging them, passing intel to sympathetic reporters. Seeing John get caught up on those charges was mission accomplished.

Newkirk: I looked at the COINTELPRO report from then and they said you incited a riot. They said there were multiple fire bombings that you’d been involved in and that you’d had multiple marijuana parties at your apartment.

Burl Smith: Now, that might be the only thing that’s true in all of that, because we did party out and it was known—but, you know, it’s marijuana. [Laughs.]

Newkirk: Around the same time Resurrection City was fully up and running, John was facing indictment. What’s more, after Congress slipped a new anti-riot law into the Fair Housing Act, Tennessee passed its own similar law. They established a five-year minimum sentence for setting fires and made inciting riots a felony. In essence, John became a test case for America’s newest crackdown on Black unrest.

Burl Smith: And the legislature met in July. And in September, the grand jury here in Shelby County indicted me for participating in a riot and trespassing in a public school, which were not even laws when this happened.

Newkirk: The only eyewitness testimony of any physical wrongdoing was a single account of one of John’s comrades throwing a bottle at an officer. There were no serious injuries. The scene that everyone described at Carver seems like it barely fit the definition of a real “riot” at all. But to the jurors, under the new state riot law, John became an example.

Burl Smith: That was the extent of it. But I did five years for that.

Newkirk: While John Burl Smith was on trial, the world changed. Going into the Republican National Convention, Richard Nixon was the front-runner. But two factions inside the party tried to find delegates and maybe even join together to stop him. At the convention, Maryland’s Governor, Spiro Agnew, sent his delegates to Nixon and helped him win. Agnew had been a political nobody until he turned against civil-rights leaders in Baltimore. Now he was giving Nixon’s nomination speech.

Spiro Agnew: When a nation is in crisis and history speaks firmly to that nation, it needs a man to match the times. You don’t create such a man. You don’t discover such a man. You recognize such a man, the one whom all America will recognize as a man whose time has come—the man for 1968, the honorable Richard M. Nixon.

Nixon: All right. Thank you very much.

Newkirk: Agnew had become a voice of a kind of white backlash. He could knit together suburban moderates and southern conservatives. So when it came time for Nixon to pick a running mate, Nixon picked the nobody.

Reporter: Conservative Republicans generally applauded the choice. Liberals were dismayed.

Newkirk: The ticket was a clear signal to Black voters. The Baltimore Afro-American, the biggest Black paper in Maryland, understood that Agnew’s appeal wasn’t in policy or achievements, but his rhetoric in the face of Black protest.

Reporter: Mr. Agnew’s chief claims to fame are that he became governor of Maryland as the lesser of two evils and has proven his ability to insult Black leaders.

Newkirk: For white Americans, the Nixon-Agnew ticket had a pitch that worked. In one of his most famous ads, there are images of cities burning, of police confronting rioters in the street. And there’s some music.

Nixon: Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence. So I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.

Newkirk: By the end of 1968, the optimism of Resurrection City seemed like a relic of a forgotten age. Nixon won the election, of course. You know that. Spiro Agnew became the vice president and became Nixon’s attack dog.

Agnew: You cannot have justice. You cannot have change without order.

Newkirk: Under Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, COINTELPRO continued, focusing more on disrupting Black revolutionary groups.

Reporter: State’s attorneys police arrived at Fred Hampton’s West Side apartment, half a block from Panther headquarters, at 4:45 this morning.

Newkirk: On December 4, 1969, a group of law-enforcement officers, with the FBI’s backing, assassinated the Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his sleep.

Reporter: Hampton’s body was found in bed.

Newkirk: Hampton’s lawyer, Flint Taylor, understood this as a clear proclamation from the government.

Flint Taylor: … to send the message to all those young folks, whether they be Black or white, who wanted to get involved in the struggle: We’ll kill you in your bed.

Newkirk: Under Nixon, the Fair Housing Act was supposed to go into full effect. He even supported the law on the campaign trail. But once in office, he opposed enforcement, especially in America’s mostly white suburbs. He said that he was against forced integration.

In D.C., the riots remade reality. The city became a model for everything happening in Nixon’s America. White folks fled for the suburbs where integration never really came.

The law and order that Nixon promised came with the first War on Drugs. All the while, the burned shells of buildings from ’68 were never rebuilt. Walking and driving past them in Cardozo, Theophus Brooks only felt regret.

Theophus Brooks: We used to joke: “Why don’t we go downtown or Connecticut Avenue? We aren’t going down there.” You weren’t going down there, right? But it was the thing where, as young people, we thinking about the burning, the excitement, stealing stuff. That’s what’s on everyone’s mind—what can we get? I’m going home and I don’t have nothin’. I’m mad.

Newkirk: Do you think we missed an opportunity to do something then, in ’68?

Brooks: Yeah, we could have really banded together. You know what? Let me tell you something. I’m glad you said that. As close as we were, especially in this city, we could have made a big difference.

Newkirk: But there were people who did come together to try and do something. Even though the organization of SNCC was falling apart, a lot of the old organizers were still in D.C. They still had influence, especially cultural influence. Black people were calling themselves Black for the first time, partly because of the Black Power slogan. Young people were wearing afros, adopting Black-revolutionary fashion. The way SNCC and other radical organizations talked about the struggle became mainstream. The SNCC folks in D.C. had an opportunity, and they knew a guy.

Tony Gittens: There was this organization called African American Resources, and it was Courtland and Charlie, Marvin and some other people, and they asked me if I would be on the board.

Newkirk: Tony Gittens graduated from Howard a month after the riots. Around the same time, a group of SNCC veterans started a bookstore, the Drum and Spear. Tony was friends with a lot of them. He’d worked for the school newspaper. He didn’t have a job. So they named him the operator of the Drum and Spear.

Gittens: They were looking for somebody to do it and they threw me the keys, and that was how I became the manager of the bookstore.

Newkirk: It was a hard turn for Tony, after going down south to register voters and leading campus protests and then witnessing the rebellion on 14th Street. But for him—for all of them—it also sounds like it was therapy. They were finally able to settle down and build something. They had a radio show. They started a school. They had a press. The bookstore was located near 14th and U, near Cardozo. It gave them a chance to make beauty in a place that had seen heartbreak.

But for some Washingtonians, that kind of beauty never returned. Vanessa Lawson’s family was still waiting to hear any news about her brother Vincent. Vincent went out the night after King was killed, looting Morton’s department store to get his mother some stockings, and had never come back.

Weeks passed. Then months. Then years. Still, Vanessa and her family heard nothing. Vanessa moved on from junior high and started taking the bus to high school.

Vanessa Lawson: And I tell you, it was more than once—twice for sure, could have been three or four times, but I acted on it twice—I would see somebody that looked like him and I’d get off the bus. I had to know for sure.

Newkirk: The private investigator the family hired to find Vincent had put the idea in her head that Vincent might be out there alive, with amnesia. She held on to that hope. The whole family did. It was even worse for them than if Vincent had died and they’d known. Vanessa’s grandmother walked the block by Morton’s week after week after week, hoping she might run into Vincent. She died a couple years later. Vanessa’s mother was hurting, and she drank to dull the pain. Every once in a while, when the morgue had an unidentified body, they called Vanessa’s father to take a look.

Lawson: My mom would be on pins and needles, and it was never him.

Newkirk: It was easy to fall into a kind of a stasis, a repetition—look for Vincent, hope, repeat—in the same buildings and on the same blocks. But then, in 1971, construction workers finally came to H Street to demolish part of the block that had burned. The workers had found a skeleton in the warehouse next to Morton’s. It had been years, and the body was beyond identification.

Lawson: But he had this medallion. My dad had bought us medallions. And both of our medallions said “V.L.”

Newkirk: They said “V.L.”

Lawson: My name is Vanessa Lawson. His was Vincent Lawson. And they both said said “V.L.” on them. He still had his.

***

Newkirk: When I visited Vanessa in her home outside D.C., she shared photos of her family, going back generations. One of her uncles was a Tuskegee Airman. She’s got pictures of the farm the family comes from in Virginia. She’s also got newspaper clippings of how Vincent’s story has been told in the news. In those stories, there’s not usually a lot about what happened to the family after they found Vincent’s body. Vanessa says they wanted to do things the right way: They wanted to do an autopsy, get a death certificate, take Vincent’s body and have a service.

Lawson: They had already had him cremated, so they cremated him and they didn’t even keep his ashes.

Newkirk: The city had already disposed of Vincent’s remains. They just threw him away.

Lawson: We didn’t have anything to work with. We didn’t have a memorial. We didn’t have his ashes. We never had anything. We didn’t have a gravesite, because there was no burial. We didn’t have a church service. There was nothing.

Newkirk: And then people from the city came by Vanessa’s mom’s place on East Capitol.

Lawson: Mayor Washington and his little entourage came to our house in the black limo. And these guys got out, and his little short, chunky self. And they were carrying this basket, you know, with all these flowers and ribbons. And they had literally bought us a turkey dinner. And he said he wanted to apologize.

Newkirk: He came to apologize.

Lawson: He came to apologize to my mom, and she was yelling at him saying, “You lied!” You know, “You told everybody—you told the world that those buildings were checked out before they were covered up. And it was a lie.”

Newkirk: The family was already spiraling, but Vanessa says it was like a double spiral. Her grandmother had just recently passed. Her mother was in bad shape.

Lawson: My mom was drinking a lot. My mom was working about six days straight and off for like three days. And on the three days I was like, “Hello? Hello? Remember me?” kind of thing, you know. “I’m still here. You still got a kid here.”

Newkirk: Vanessa’s parents had been divorced for years. Her father had his own family across town. Her brothers were in and out of her mother’s apartment, and her mother was in bad shape. Her drinking got worse and worse. Vanessa became her caretaker. She cooked and cleaned and took care of the place. Even in high school, she got a job downtown. Sometimes on weekends, Vanessa would stay with her father, to get away from stuff, just live like a normal teenager for a while. One weekend in the summer, she stayed with her dad until Monday and went to work from there.

Lawson: And I went to work July 23. I went to work and I went out at lunchtime, and when I came back with my little bookbag and stuff, I remember the white-lady supervisor—she came and she grabbed me.

Newkirk: Vanessa’s coworkers were crying and told her there was a family emergency. When her father came to pick her up, he’d been crying too. But he wouldn’t let her know what was going on. Vanessa made him pull the car over to tell her.

Lawson: And he says, “It’s your mother—she’s gone.” And he just started crying and you know. And he’s crying and crying, and I’m like, It’s my mother? What do you mean my mother? And he says, “She’s gone.” What you mean she’s gone? “She died.”

Newkirk: Vanessa’s mother died. It was another blow to the family, to Vanessa. But she says she couldn’t even feel sad about it. She was going into her senior year. Her mom knew somebody who was supposed to make her a prom dress for free. Vanessa needed her mother. She was angry at her mother for leaving.

Lawson: I was mad, mad, mad, mad at my mom. How could you do this to me? I’m going into my senior year in high school. You know, You’re missing so much. You know, Now you’re dead. You know, You just wanted to go be with him.

And I remember picking out the casket. I remember picking out the dress. I remember, you know, telling them, you know, how she liked her hair. I remember going to the viewing. I remember biting my lips so hard that it bled.

I never cried. I wasn’t in a crying mode.

Newkirk: She didn’t cry at all. Not for Vincent. Not for her mother. She just tried to keep going. To keep working. But then she got sick too.

Lawson: I got a cold and I couldn’t shake it. I couldn’t shake that common cold.

Newkirk: She started having breathing problems. Her dad made her take off work and check in at Providence Hospital. But the doctors didn’t believe that her main problem was physical.

Lawson: But I got diagnosed with emotional setback even though I was only 16, 17 years old. My body should have been able to fight it off before, way before it got to that point. But my resistance was so low.

Newkirk: She couldn’t shake it. And it got worse. Vanessa says her white-blood-cell levels dropped. They tried steroids. They gave her oxygen. They brought mental-health professionals. But she just wasn’t responding. But then, she says, one night one of the nuns from the hospital came into her room to talk to her.

Lawson: And I remember one night in particular, I just lay there on the bed.

It was somewhere late during the night and this lady came in to check on me. And she had on white with some red stripes on it, and she talked to me. I can’t tell you verbatim, but—I can’t even tell you how long this went on—but she started stroking my hair. She stroked my earlobes. My mother used to do that—my earlobes—all the time.

She grabbed my hand and she told me, “Your mom is sorry and she’s with your brother, and they’re both wanting you to get better. She wants you to do good. And she’s really sorry, and everything is gonna be okay.”

When she left I started crying. I think I cried the next 24 hours or something, and that’s what I needed to do. And when they called my dad the next day, everybody came and said, “What happened?” He says. “Who talked to you?” I said, “The lady that was here last night.” And he wanted to know who it was so he could thank her, you know, whatever. But, she didn’t exist.

Newkirk: Providence.

Lawson: Okay.

Newkirk: Vanessa believes in Providence: the idea that things happen for a reason, that the things that happened to her happened to her for a reason. So does John Burl Smith. He ended up having to do two years in prison, at the Shelby County Penal Farm. But he says that his sentence saved him from the worse fates that came to lots of other Black radicals in the country.

***

John Burl Smith: They really hunted us out of existence. All the Black Power revolutionaries were either on the run, left the country, dead, or in jail.

Newkirk: While John was in prison, the Invaders disintegrated. With King dead, leadership went back to mostly antagonizing the SCLC and other groups in Memphis. One member of the Invaders was shot while attempting a robbery. Another was sent to prison for murder, and many others went to prison for other crimes. In other cities, Nixon waged war on the Panthers, and a lot of the people that John would’ve called comrades never made it home. But in prison, John found a counseling program that prepared inmates to go back out into the real world. He did so well that three years later they gave him a job as a counselor when he got out.

Burl Smith: And so when I got out in ’71, things have changed quite a bit, quite a bit. But because I got out with the job, I was able to pick my life up even better than it was before I went in. So as I said, in the grand scheme of things, I was saved and blessed. And so I’m on my third life now.

Newkirk: In his third life, John’s been studying history and how we tell the story of Black freedom in America. He’s particularly interested in how we tell the story of King, and what we got wrong about it.

Newkirk: What do you make of the fact that when King was killed, he was easily one of the most unpopular men in America? He didn’t poll, you know—in ’63 he was very popular, and every year since then, it lowered a little bit.

Burl Smith: Right.

Newkirk: In ’68, for favorability, he was like 60 to 70 percent unfavorable. He polled worse than the Vietnam War. [Laughs.] What do you make of the fact that after that assassination, some version of him is made to be an untouchable hero?

Burl Smith: Yeah.

Newkirk: How does that happen?

Burl Smith: Because he’s dead. He can’t do any more damage. When he was alive, he represented one of the greatest threats to white power in America.

***

Newkirk: Tony Gittens agrees with John. He believes that the fundamental questions about power in America were never really answered in the ’60s. The assassination in ’68 cut off a real debate, and the potential for revolution. Like John, Tony also believes that the image of King that is celebrated today is meant to keep people in place, instead of challenging things.

Tony Gittens: The American press ran to make him [Laughs.]—it was quite surprising; they made him the man who walked on water. Now, nobody was against Dr. King, but I remember that. And it was like King was the one; he was the man.

Newkirk: From Tony’s view, these sort of fundamental questions stopped being on the table for years after King’s death. He tried to keep them alive in his own work, doing what he could. That’s why he says he took notice in 2020, when people took to the streets again after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.

Gittens: And there were all these young people marching down 16th Street, you know. And I watched it and I said, “I got to go. I got to go.” I walked down to 16th Street from one circle to the next, and there were all these people there.

But it was the same kind of feeling I had the night of Dr. King’s assassination out on Columbia Road and 14th Street. The same thing. I had to be there. I just had to be there. I did not want to miss this. I couldn’t. You know?

***

Newkirk: As it turns out, the launch of Apollo 6 did make the front page of The Washington Post on April 5, 1968. The article is pretty pessimistic. The launch was described as a setback in our race to go to the moon, as a waste of an expensive Saturn V rocket. We know now that it wasn’t really, that it actually showed how resilient the rocket was, and how problems could be controlled. But it’s interesting to think about a time when space was in front of us, when we didn’t know if its challenges were surmountable or if humans could ever reach the moon—when progress wasn’t guaranteed.

But that news item from the paper is swallowed up by other events. It’s a small column, sandwiched between news about President Johnson canceling his Hawaii trip, a photo of Martin Luther King, and an article about Spiro Agnew’s crackdown on Black protesters at Bowie State. April 5 wasn’t a day for space. It was a day for keeping our heads down and mourning.

Vanessa Lawson Dixon has clippings from the Post from that day in a scrapbook on her kitchen table. They’re part of the constellation of papers and pictures she keeps to remember Vincent.

Lawson: So this little boy right here is my nephew. This boy looks 90 percent like Vincent.

Newkirk and Ethan Brooks [together]: Yes, he does.

Lawson: My kids ask me all the time. Like my granddaughter, she’ll walk past. They know he died. They know that he didn’t have to. They know my mother was hurt from it and my mother was really sad. They know all of this, all of these things that happened was as a result of Martin Luther King getting assassinated and the significance of that.

Newkirk: One of the things Vanessa keeps is an obituary for Vincent. The Lawson family never had a service for him when they found his body in 1971. No obituaries or memorials either. But in 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the riots, Vanessa sent The Washington Post an obituary that she wrote for Vincent. It’s written as an apology from Vincent to his family for being hard-headed, for going out and getting in over his head. It’s got that picture of Vincent in it, with his spread collar and his baby face. It notes that he was only 14 years old. The date of his death is given as April 5.

Newkirk: Why did you pick that day?

Lawson: That’s the day that he went missing. That’s the day if he could have come home, he would have. That’s the last day that anybody saw him. That’s the day he should have come home.

Newkirk: She’ll never know the exact date Vincent died. None of us will. But it helps Vanessa to mark the date as April 5, because it connects him to King. People may not remember that a boy went out that night to score some stockings for his mother. They may not remember the mother who died just three years later. They might not remember Vanessa. But they will remember the nights that America grieved and the nights that America burned. So in a way, they’ll always remember Vincent.

The Poor People’s Campaign and Reverend Ralph Abernathy march

In May 1968, more than a month after King’s assassination, the Poor People’s Campaign, a movement created in response to economic inequities, march in Washington, D.C.

Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated

Kennedy, a senator representing New York and the Democratic presidential candidate, is shot and killed by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968, after winning the California presidential primary.

Richard Nixon is elected president

Republican Richard Nixon is elected president of the United States on November 5, 1968. Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew is elected vice president.

Black Panther Fred Hampton is killed

On December 4, 1969, law-enforcement officers—with FBI support—kill the Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in his sleep.

Holy Week: Inferno

2023-03-14T06:00:00-04:00

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Reporter: You don’t think the death of Martin Luther King had anything to do with the rioting?

Young man: Some of them, they did it because of Martin Luther King, and some of them didn’t. Some of them did it because they just needed clothes for Easter and they didn’t have money to get it.

Reporter: Paul, you participated in the riots. Can you tell us why they—why you—had a part in them?

Paul: I had a part in it because where I live at is five stories high. And I can see my cleaners. And I saw them burning down my cleaners. So I say, Why shouldn’t I get something? And everybody burn down my clothes, take my clothes out, and do what they want to do? So I’m gonna go in the store and get what I want.

Reporter: You got any feeling about it at all, David?

David: No, I don’t.

Reporter: Why not?

David: It’s kind of fun to me, see, burning up property and stuff like that.

Reporter: You thought that was just fun?

David: Yes I did.

***

Vann R. Newkirk II: A riot is a collective. When people start to act together, the crowd can seem to have a mind of its own. It can move like an organic entity, with a will and a drive. By the time it reaches a critical mass, people, individuals, can be swallowed up into it.

But every person who decides to go out has a reason. Frustrations, rage, passions, setbacks, or even boredom all can play a role. Years of history and upbringing and feeling all come into play in the decision to throw just one brick. And you have to consider all that to understand any riot, uprising, or rebellion. Vanessa Dixon was just 12 years old when King was killed. She was Vanessa Lawson back then.

Newkirk: Did you ever watch any of the news when they were reporting on the looting and the rioting?

Vanessa Lawson Dixon: Yes, it was unbelievable. It was unbelievable to me, for one, for myself and my friends, that we participated at the beginning of what turned out to be so, so bad.

Newkirk: How do you feel about that?

Lawson: I can say I’m sorry for the things I did. I didn’t know better. But then the flip side of me says, I’m glad for the experience.

Newkirk: I went to see Vanessa in her house to understand. Vanessa Dixon lives just outside D.C. She’s something of a family historian.

Lawson: I’ve got a bunch of projects in here. I did try to clean it up as much as I could.

Newkirk: She keeps old newspapers, comic strips, obituaries, family trees. And she’s got a ton of photographs.

Lawson: … right here is the one with the black-and-white pictures in it.

Newkirk: Oh, wow.

Newkirk: The photos are all black-and-white. But they all remind me of my own childhood. She’s got one where her three older brothers are all very little, standing in front of a brick wall, smiling. She wasn’t born yet, I guess. The youngest of the boys, Vincent, is a toddler in overalls.

Lawson: This is Vincent.

Newkirk: Vincent?

Lawson: Mm-hmm.

Newkirk: What’s he wearing here?

Newkirk: Underneath the picture, somebody scribbled, “Boys in the Hood.”

Lawson: Do you remember the little photobooth they used to have? This was at Union Station.

Newkirk: Oh, wow.

Newkirk: The picture she treasures most is one of just Vincent, the littlest of her older brothers—the closest one to her age. They were the two youngest kids. They even got matching medallions with their initials on them: V.L. They were peas in a pod.

Lawson: He was my best friend in the world. I had little girlfriends and stuff like that I called my best friend, but he was really my best friend because we, we was like the dynamic duo.

Newkirk: Maybe it’s hard to imagine the little boy from the picture going out the night of a riot, but Vanessa says that Vincent did love excitement. He got in a little trouble sometimes, and Vanessa did too. But he was smart. He did well in class and he had a way with people. He was supposed to make it out. They were supposed to make it out together.

Lawson: We always thought we could feel each other’s heartbeat when we weren’t around.

Newkirk: In the picture Vanessa showed me, Vincent is a teenager, maybe 14 or so. To me, he mostly still looks like a little boy, but you can see where he’s starting to grow up. He’s still got a baby face and these wide eyes. But he’s clearly trying to look older, you know? He’s got on one of those ’60s-style, spread-collar white shirts and a jacket. Think … like, Teddy Pendergrass style. And his lineup is immaculate.

Lawson: That was his signature haircut. You never catch him, he wasn’t into the bush.

Newkirk: So, no afro.

Lawson: He wanted it shaped up. He was always brushing it. Always brushing. He used to talk about his mustache—when he got his mustache, how it was going to look, how his beard was going to look, how he’s going to keep it so shaped up. But he never got to have any hair on his face.

***

Newkirk: After King was assassinated, Vincent hit the streets, just like his sister. I wonder why he went out. Vanessa says part of it was that he was a bit of a thrill seeker, a daredevil. But there was also something there from how he grew up, and what he didn’t have growing up.

When they were kids, Vanessa and Vincent’s family bounced around the working-class neighborhoods in the heart of old Black D.C., around the H Street Corridor. The house Vanessa seems to remember best was right off 8th and H [Street] NE, right down the way from where the old Apollo Theater used to be. Their parents didn’t make a lot. Sometimes, instead of going to Shoe Town for new shoes, their dad would take them to Safeway, the grocery store.

Lawson: And there was a big, old, big, old basket. Huge. And the shoes weren’t in boxes. They were just tied together by the shoestrings. [Laughs.] And we, you know, while they did the shopping, our job was, You want some shoes? Dig through them, find your size and find what you want. Typically, that’s what most of the people around there did for their kids.

Newkirk: But, even as little kids, Vincent and Vanessa stayed with some money. The dynamic duo was always scheming on how to do odd jobs and hustle to make more for themselves. They were everywhere around H Street. They did yard work.

Lawson: We would knock on people’s doors and ask them, you know, “Do you want me to rake your leaves?”

Newkirk: They sold popcorn bags and odds and ends on the street. Their dad got them a broke-down Radio Flyer wagon from Goodwill, and they fixed it up and used it to take people’s groceries home—for a fee, of course.

Lawson: We couldn’t get them all in the wagon. So I literally had to carry a bag and my brother and I took turns. He would pull and I would carry, and he would carry and I would pull.

Newkirk: Vanessa and Vincent kept the money they made in shoeboxes, and needed bigger and bigger sized boxes when they came up with more hustles. One time, they turned their backyard into a petting zoo.

But things changed for the family when their parents got divorced. Vanessa and her siblings had to move with their mother away from H Street to the housing projects out on East Capitol, right by the Maryland border.

Lawson: I remember riding in a car up East Capitol Street, and when we got to where it was, my brother said, “All these houses look alike.” I had never even seen a project before. He hadn’t either.

Newkirk: The projects were different. It was like they were designed to remind people that they were poor. Mom had to take up a job keeping house for white folks across town. Vanessa hated that. They all still went to the Morton’s department store back on H Street to shop for essentials. But now those trips were heartbreaking for Vanessa and Vincent.

Lawson: She would get this cardboard box and she’d open it up. And then they had about six pairs of stockings in it, and she would take a couple of pair out. And one time I remember my brother asking her, “Mom, why do you keep coming up here and getting two pair of stockings?” Okay, and she said, “Well, that’s all I can afford for right now.” And we used to try to give her some of our money. We even tried to go in Morton’s to try to buy stuff. They wouldn’t let us in the store without a parent.

Newkirk: Looking at Vincent in that picture, with his spread collar and sharp haircut, he looks like was moving from boyhood to adulthood. He was trying to be somebody. He was blazing a new trail, finishing up his first year of high school. He went to school back over by his grandmother’s house, still out by H Street, which meant that he and Vanessa had to be apart more than ever. He wanted to make his folks happy. He wanted to make his mom happy. And then came the assassination.

Lawson: We see people blowing horns and sitting on the car doors and yelling and screaming and smoke bombs. It was crazy. It was hype for me, and I don’t think any of us had any fear. That’s why I know my brother felt the same way.

Newkirk: Vanessa and Vincent were just two of the thousands of Black people who hit the streets in D.C. after King was killed. Each one of those thousands is more than just a footnote to history. On the whole, they all tell a story that goes beyond the binary of the triumph of the civil-rights movement and the tragedy of losing one man. They help explain why, after a decade of supposed progress in America, its capital city, and one of its blackest cities, burned.

***

Newkirk: Part 2: “Inferno.”

***

Newkirk: Which route would you have taken, did you take?

Tony Gittens: We would have taken right down this street. This is Columbia Road. And we would have come from down where Howard is and walked up. We didn’t take any bus, there was no metro, and so we just walked.

Newkirk: Today, Tony Gittens is an institution in D.C. He founded the Washington, D.C., International Film Festival and has run it for over 35 years. He was on the local Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and he’s known just about every mayor to come through the city. He used to work with Marion Barry. He knows these streets like the back of his hand. But back in 1968, April 4, he was still a kid from Brooklyn who had only been in D.C. for a few years. He was attending Howard University.

Gittens: I didn’t know anything about Washington when I came here. I had no idea. I knew I was going to Howard. That’s all I knew. Got on the bus from Brooklyn, came. That’s all I knew.

Newkirk: While Vanessa and Vincent Lawson were settling into the East Capitol projects, Tony got involved with The Hilltop, the Howard University newspaper. And he started volunteering with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC—one of the major civil-rights protest organizations. It was famous on campus. Some of SNCC’s earliest and most well-known members had gone to Howard, including Kwame Ture, then known as Stokely Carmichael. Back In ’66, they took Tony on his first trip down South, to Alabama.

Gittens: And so I got to meet Stokely and Bob Manns and these other folks who had been in the movement in the South. Then they moved up to D.C. and we became friends, you know, became friends.

Newkirk: In 1966, Stokely was the chairman of SNCC. He was one of the most famous—or infamous—Black men in America. The same summer Tony went down to Alabama, Stokely started talking about Black Power. It was new. It was radical.

Stokely Carmichael: Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down tomorrow to get rid of the dirt in here. Now, from now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell them. What do you want?

Crowd: Black Power!

Stokely Carmichael: What do you want?

Crowd: Black Power!

Stokely Carmichael: Everybody, what do you want?

Newkirk : What was Stokely like?

Gittens: Stokely. Stokely was a little … um … I was always a little scared of Stokely, until later on, when I got to know him slightly, a bit—slightly a bit.

He was a smart guy. He knew every goddamn thing. Bob Manns used to say, “Stokely Carmichael, you know every goddamn thing.” And he was a smart guy.

Newkirk: Tony turned all that organizing experience with SNCC into momentum on campus. In March, he and other students staged demonstrations, calling for change inside and outside the walls of campus. They even occupied the university’s administration building. And in response, Howard agreed to create a new student disciplinary system and consider making a more pro-Black curriculum.

Gittens: You know, we got, we walked into a room and they would almost say, “What do you want?” [Laughs.] They didn’t want us going back in that building. I tell you that.

Newkirk: SNCC was a major inspiration for Tony and the student protesters. They also were becoming a force in D.C. politics. Stokely had moved up to the city to try and build a power base for his organizing. Other SNCC veterans also moved up from projects in the Deep South. One of them was Frank Smith.

Newkirk: So you were in Mississippi for years?

Frank Smith: Six years.

Newkirk: What brought you to D.C.?

Frank Smith: Well, I met a woman who was in the civil-rights movement, too—a Howard University student. I dropped out of Morehouse. She dropped out of Howard. And we got married in ’65, and one of the things that we promised was we were both going to finish. She wanted to go to medical school. And so we eventually came here.

Newkirk: Frank is from Georgia, and he started his activism as a student at Morehouse College. He was involved in boycotts and other protests pretty early on. He says it’s something that was sparked in him by the killing of Emmett Till in 1955.

Frank Smith: I think I was in the eighth or ninth grade in Newnan, Georgia, when a young girl named Jessie Smith brought the Jet magazine to school with Emmett Till’s picture in there, that awful assassination and brutalization of him and mutilation of his body. And I think in my heart, I must have thought, That could have been me. And, This has to stop. And I hear that from a lot of people of my generation. It was personal, really, in a sense.

Newkirk: Frank was a founding member of SNCC when the group was formed at Shaw University in 1960. When the group decided to shift gears from the sit-ins and Freedom Rides to its voter-registration project, he was the first person they sent into the teeth of Jim Crow, the Mississippi Delta.

Frank Smith: So people ask me, “Why did you feel … Were you scared when you … ?” Well, hell, being scared was a rite of passage for Black boys in my generation. You were scared all the time. So what’s the difference between being scared in Mississippi and being scared in Georgia? You’ve got the same fear that some white person thinks they’re entitled, and with the law behind them and with all the tradition, could just do whatever the hell they want to you and your family and your property and your friends. Who wants to live like that?

Newkirk: He got there just seven years after Emmett Till was killed. In Mississippi, people were still being fired, beaten, disappeared, or worse for even joining the NAACP, let alone registering to vote. Just a few years earlier, a Black man named Mack Charles Parker was murdered and his body thrown from a bridge over the Pearl River. SNCC didn’t have infrastructure or protection. But Frank got to work getting sharecroppers to register. One of the people who was brave enough to do it was Fannie Lou Hamer. She ended up becoming a household name in Black America.

Frank Smith: She was already made by the time we met her. We found her in the Delta. She was ready for her freedom.

Newkirk: Frank had been to D.C. during the height of Freedom Summer in 1964, trying to spread the news nationally about the folks like Fannie Lou Hamer who were trying to participate in democracy for the first time. But when he moved up to the city for real, to the Adams Morgan neighborhood, it was a big change from life in the Mississippi Delta. Luckily for him, there were some familiar faces.

Frank Smith: One advantage of living in Adams Morgan was that it looked like what SNCC had started to look like then. And I wasn’t the only one there. There was probably 20 people from SNCC who were living in the neighborhood, too, in between there and 14th Street. So we had enough people for our own little tribe, if we wanted to have a tribe.

Newkirk: Frank started organizing immediately. He helped tenants out in disputes with landlords. He was all over the Black neighborhoods in D.C. He actually felt at home there. Lots of Black families had just recently arrived from the South. There were middle-class, working-class, and upper-class communities; Black universities like Howard; people who followed King; Black Power activists; and members of the Nation of Islam. There were people who just wanted to keep their heads down. Living in D.C., Frank saw potential for bringing everybody together. On April 3, Frank Smith was still working towards that goal when he ran into Martin Luther King.

Frank Smith: The day before he was killed, I flew into the airport in Memphis. He was coming from Atlanta. And I think it was Andy Young that pointed me out, saying, “There’s one of those SNCC’ers over there.” And so King came over and asked me … said he wanted me to come to Memphis to help organize the young people—he said the young Panthers.

Newkirk: King and his folks called all the Black radicals Panthers. But he was really talking about a local Memphis group, called the Invaders.

Frank Smith: They were obviously interested because they were coming to the demonstration and stuff. They just wouldn’t join the march. They were marching on the sides. They were throwing rocks and stuff. And he was scared that they were going to incite the cops to riot. And he wanted to see somebody come and help organize those young people. And I was probably 25 years old then, and so I wasn’t so young anymore, and also I told him I’d hung up my marching shoes. And he said, “Don’t ever hang up your marching shoes.” That was his last words to me.

***

Newkirk: In D.C., Tony Gittens and his friends were riding high. They were celebrating their successful protests against the Howard University administration. On the night of April 4, he and the boys were just hanging out.

Gittens: I was in Drew Hall, which is a dormitory, and in the social lobby there, and we’re just hanging around, talking, you know, some people probably playing cards and stuff. I don’t know.

Newkirk: And then …

Walter Cronkite: Good evening. Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of nonviolence in the civil-rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee. Police have issued an all points bulletin …

Gittens: Everybody stopped. Everybody stopped. You know, everybody stopped and said, “What?”

Newkirk: Across the city, Black Washingtonians of all ages came out as more and more people heard the news. Rage came spontaneously, like hot tears or a lump in the throat.

Gittens: And they were talking about—there was this riot in the streets of D.C. So we had to be there.

Newkirk: Tony and his friends walked out from campus. They figured that if anything was happening, it was gonna be down on 14th and U. It was one of the busiest and most famous street corners in Black America. The corner was where everything happened. There was a drugstore there, and nearby a florist, banks, theaters—lots of shops. They didn’t have to walk far.

Gittens: The closer we got to it, the more you could smell the smoke.

Newkirk: Stokely Carmichael had actually been there, on that corner, when it all started. He’d been going from store to store, telling white business owners to shut down shop and go home. He was also telling Black folks to be careful. That they weren’t prepared to go up against the guns and tear gas of the police and military. But then, somebody threw a trash can through the window of the Peoples Drug Store.

Gittens: So we got to 14th and Columbia Road. And I remember this sharply, that there was all this fire. I mean, the place was … it was like a forest fire. You know, it was like this red fire. It was coming out of these buildings, these stores.

Newkirk: They made it a few blocks north of the epicenter. They were surrounded on all sides by fire.

Gittens: There were these young guys who were breaking into the stores and taking out the stuff, whatever was in that window there. A lot of people were just watching by, shouting at the police. Cars were going down, honking their horns, and there were these people just walking the streets, shouting, pissed off—just very, very angry people.

Newkirk: Walking on Columbia Road with Tony today, you can envision looking down the hill and seeing the smoke, hearing the chants of “Black Power!”, seeing the police … powerless.

Gittens: The police had no control. I mean, they had no control. They tried to talk to people. They weren’t pulling any arms or anything. But nobody was paying any attention to them. It was just chaos. It was like a war zone.

Newkirk: Some people went home. Down on U Street, things got out of hand, and Stokely got in a car and drove off. But lots of people, like Tony, just stayed out there, in a daze.

Gittens: You know, we felt like we were a part of it, quite frankly. We weren’t breaking into any buildings or setting any fires; we made no attempt to stop it; we understood it, thought maybe it was time for it to happen. We just felt, you know, Hey, America brought this on itself and this is what they had to pay.

We walked the street. I was up all night. I remember being up all night and just walking the street. Nobody wanted to mess with the police. We just stayed away from the police, just watching what was going on.

Newkirk: Why did you feel like you had to be out there to see it?

Gittens: It wasn’t even a question. Um … it would have been cowardly for me not to be there, that these were my people, in a way. These were the people who were fighting the fight. I didn’t even think about not going. [Laughs.] I had to be there. If the police were going to come and take us all to jail, I had to be one of the ones that was going to go down there.

Newkirk: Tony says he never participated in the riots. He wasn’t even really a King guy, philosophically. But he was angry at white people.

Gittens: This had built up over months, over years of frustration, not getting any response from the government. No change. No change. And this was like the last straw. He was holding it back.

Newkirk: He was holding it back?

Gittens: Holding it back. He would’ve said, Don’t do this rioting. He would have said, you know, Be cool. Go home. Demonstrate. March. You know. But don’t go in here and tear up this place like this. He would have said that. He was holding it back. And they took him away. Dams burst. Dams burst. I mean, that was my feeling. He was the good guy, and you killed him.

Newkirk: Within just a few hours, disturbances were reported in many of the country’s largest Black communities. There was unrest in Harlem, Brooklyn, Detroit, Cincinnati, Trenton. There were even reports coming from outside of cities. Frank Smith saw what rebellion looked like in rural Mississippi.

Frank Smith: So I was actually in Mississippi the day he was killed. I was in Greenwood. And I can tell you, the demonstrations broke out everywhere.

Newkirk: They broke out in Mississippi?

Frank Smith: Everywhere brother. People burned cotton gins and stuff, man. Everybody did some kind of protesting, man.

Newkirk: Frank watched the chaos unfold around him. He also paid attention to the news from the rest of the country. He knew D.C. was on fire. He had to find a way back to his wife. He wanted to get out there and organize his community.

But Frank didn’t know what would happen next. He didn’t know whether one night of disturbances would become many. Whether it might become the revolution or the race war that so many had feared. He didn’t know how America would react. He didn’t know that when he left the fields of Greenwood, he would be leaving one era and entering another.

Stokley Carmichael forms an SNCC base in D.C.

In January 1968, three months before King’s assassination, Kwame Ture, then known as Stokely Carmichael, moves to Washington, D.C., to build a power base for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

D.C. residents learn about King’s assassination

A couple of hours after King’s assassination, Carmichael and his SNCC comrades ask businesses in D.C.’s U Street corridor to close. Carmichael attracts a growing crowd.

D.C. residents begin to riot

Around 9:30 p.m. on April 4, the first glass is broken in Washington, D.C.—the window of the Peoples Drug Store at the intersection of U Street and 14th Street.

Holy Week: Black Messiah

2023-03-14T06:00:00-04:00

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts

Archival news narrator: Memo. To: S.A.C. Boston. From: the director, FBI. Subject: Counterintelligence program.

Goals: One, prevent the coalition of militant Black-nationalist groups. An effective coalition of Black-nationalist groups might be the first step toward a real Mau Mau in America. Two, prevent the rise of a messiah who could unify and electrify the militant Black-nationalist movement. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad all aspire to this position. King could be a very real contender for this position.

Vann R. Newkirk II: Starting in 1956, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI ran a secret program to spy on so-called subversive movements in the U.S. It was named the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. Its true extent wasn’t known until years later, when a group of activists broke into an FBI office and mailed over 1,000 classified documents to journalists. Through all the major moments of the Black freedom struggle, the FBI listened. They watched. They sabotaged.

The program expanded during the mid-’60s, with the rise of Black militant groups, and the beginnings of uprisings in America’s ghettos.

Reporter: While ghetto problems deepen, the Black militants gather and the crowds at their meetings get bigger. Many of them will not speak to whites at all. They have given up on the white man’s world and are desperately determined to make a Black world totally separate, totally and proudly black.

Newkirk: To J. Edgar Hoover, the danger was in the potential for any Black leader to help spark a Black insurgency.

Reporter: The FBI had trouble distinguishing between nonviolent Blacks and militant revolutionaries. To the FBI, the whole movement appeared dangerous, particularly if one man could unify millions of American Blacks.

Newkirk: Hoover wasn’t alone in his belief. In fact, Black radical leaders also thought that major riots in 1967 in the Black ghettos in Newark and Detroit had revolutionary potential. Folks like Stokely Carmichael and the Panthers out West built their philosophies on the hope that a riot in a Black ghetto could become something more—that they could start a chain reaction to topple white supremacy in America. In 1968, SNCC Chairman H. Rap Brown said that this revolution was imminent.

H. Rap Brown: We stand on the eve of a Black revolution, brothers. Masses of our people are in the streets. They’re fighting tit for tat, tooth for tooth, an eye for an eye, and a life for a life. The rebellions that we see are merely dress rehearsals for the revolution that’s to come.

Newkirk: The FBI and COINTELPRO’s methods grew more and more extreme. In the late ’60s they moved to outright blackmail and disruption schemes. Even after King was killed, COINTELPRO continued to watch his friends and family and sow discord in their ranks.

The FBI was probably also watching Stokely Carmichael on the first night of riots. That night, April 4, Stokely and his watchers had been caught off guard by the fury of the streets.

The next day, April 5, would be different. Everybody assumed the riots were coming back. But just how they came back was the question. Could Black rage and grief be channeled and directed into revolution? Would they fizzle out on its own? Or would they be crushed by the state?

***

Newkirk: Part 3: “Black Messiah.”

***

Newkirk: By the morning of April 5, less than 24 hours after Dr. King was killed, the riots had already made their mark on D.C. Fires had consumed much of 14th Street, along with some other areas. People left behind burned buildings, abandoned cars, and debris, all still smoking.

That morning, tourists were supposed to come in by the thousands for the Cherry Blossom Festival. But they stayed away.

Most people who worked downtown stayed away too. What was left was an eerie quiet. The breath before the next plunge into chaos. Still, Frank Smith was trying his hardest to get back home from Mississippi.

Frank Smith: I flew back to Washington. I got to the National Airport, and I couldn’t—taxicab driver didn’t want to take me. He said, “I’m not going to Washington. That place is on fire.”

Newkirk: When he finally found a cab, the driver would only go as far as Connecticut Avenue. Frank had to walk a ways to his home in Adams Morgan. But he had to get there. His wife was there. She had been there during the first night of riots, and she was terrified.

Frank Smith: She was scared to go out the house, you know. And we talkin’ about people—she had been in Mississippi with me. She was in Philadelphia, Mississippi, when the kids were killed down there. And we had seen violence. But this was very different. This was, it was like chaos.

Newkirk: Frank had led protests and demonstrations across the country. He had been with SNCC since the beginning, and his work in Mississippi was regularly dangerous. He’d helped name the organization the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and dedicated himself to movement tactics. Even when things got rowdy, he was trained. He was used to each demonstration having a concrete set of objectives. But he just couldn’t get his arms around what had happened in D.C. It was emotional. There was no organization.

Frank Smith: There was no set of demands. There was no goals that we could see. There was no—it was just people just reacting. And, you know, any time you’re leading a demonstration, there’s always a chance it’ll get out of hand. There’s always a chance. And in this case, just what it looked like to me, was that it was out of hand.

Newkirk: But around the city, some people were trying to give shape to Black rage.

At Howard University, most students hadn’t gone out on the night of April 4. But the next morning, activists on campus tried to galvanize students who still didn’t really know what to do.

Tony Gittens: People were very, very surprised. They weren’t ready to do what they were doing over on 14th Street, start tearing the place up.

Newkirk: I visited Howard with Tony Gittens to see his old stomping grounds. We checked out the dorm where he and his friends were playing cards on the night King was killed. We walked past the green where his friends had tried to organize a rally the morning after. He says, that morning, the tension was building.

Gittens: You know, every place I went people were angry. It was unbelievable. Some women, the young ladies, were crying. That was the sentiment. Nobody was passive about it.

Newkirk: That morning, The Hilltop, the campus newspaper, released an essay saying basically that nonviolence was dead.

“Much of the argument that through nonviolent marching and civil disobedience the Black will be liberated has no doubt been totally erased from the minds of the Black people in this country. There is a sense of outrage that another Black man has been murdered, and he a spokesman for nonviolence.”

They pushed even further. The writers of the op-ed said that one of the lessons of King’s death might be that:

“Liberation calls for more than we have heretofore been willing to pay.”

It was a provocative statement to make just after an assassination. But it was aimed at their fellow students and faculty. People who they thought were happy to sit in the ivory tower while the world burned. Tony was ready for a fight.

Gittens: Nobody was going to mess with us that day. [Laughs.] No security guard, none of that. They weren’t going to mess with us. They knew better.

Newkirk: That same morning, the leaders of SNCC, also tried their best to provoke people into action. They had recently dropped the whole nonviolent thing, and changed their name to the Student National Coordinating Committee. They invited journalists to their headquarters.

Floyd McKissick: This press conference will be for only five minutes. As soon as the press conference is over, you gentlemen will not leave anything in here that you didn’t bring in here. Your pens, your cigarette butts—you take them with you. If you wasting the water, you have to clean it up.

Newkirk: The press conference had actually been planned before the assassination to speak out against the incarceration of the current chairman of SNCC, H. Rap Brown. Brown was accused of inciting a riot in Maryland the summer before.

McKissick: Right, here, immediately right, is Stokely Carmichael, who is staff here in Washington, D.C.

Stokely Carmichael: We were very upset that Reverend Brown had been in jail for 41 days. And Governor Agnew of Maryland still seems to persist with his nonsensical charges. Now, we want the brother out of jail next week when he comes to trial.

Newkirk: In the footage of the press conference, all the SNCC leaders are standing together behind a table full of microphones. The other SNCC guys are wearing all black. Stokely stands out. He’s tall. He’s commanding. He’s got sunglasses on, and a long jacket. Behind him there are two posters, one of Malcolm X and another of H. Rap Brown. But he starts talking about Martin Luther King.

Carmichael: When white America killed Dr. King last night, she opened the eyes for every Black man in this country. When white America got rid of Marcus Garvey, she did it and she said he was an extremist; he was crazy. When they got rid of Brother Malcolm X, they said he was preaching hate; he deserved what he got. But when they got rid of brother Martin Luther King, they had absolutely no reason to do so. He was the one man in our race who was trying to teach our people to have love, compassion, and mercy for what white people had done. When white America killed Dr. King last night, she declared war on us.

Newkirk: As far as the FBI’s potential Black messiahs went, Stokely was on the list right behind King. It was Stokely who had been out on the scene the previous night, when riots started. The media was already blaming him for fanning the flames. He gave voice to all the people who felt like this was more than just the assassination of a single person. King was supposed to be the last best hope for a reckoning without blood. Stokely promised retribution.

Carmichael: The rebellions that have been occurring around the cities of this country is just light stuff to what is about to happen. We have to retaliate for the death of our leaders. The execution of those deaths will not be in the courtrooms; they’re going to be in the streets of the United States of America.

Newkirk: Stokely was talking about the thing white people had been afraid of for generations: a race war.

Then he opened up for questions.

Reporter: Mr Carmichael, when you say the execution of those deaths will be not in a courtroom but the streets, are you going to be a little more specific about the course of action you expect?

Carmichael: I think that is quite explicit.

Reporter: You expect an organized rebellion?

Carmichael: I think it is quite explicit. We die every day. We die in Vietnam for the honkies. Why don’t we die at home for our people? Black people are not afraid to die. We die all the time. We die in your jails. We die in your ghettos. We die in your rat-infested homes. We die a thousand deaths every day. So we’re not afraid to die; today we’re going to die for our people.

Newkirk: The night before, on 14th and U, Stokely had been conflicted. He was there when the riots started, but he also tried to clear out businesses to avoid casualties. He warned young Black folks to stay away from police and tried to temper their fantasies about fighting the military with rocks and bricks. Now there were no more calls for caution. Like everything he did, some of this was for show, to shock people. But he was also speaking from the heart. It sure did seem like he thought this could be the revolution.

Reporter 2: Stokely, what do you think is ultimately leading to? A bloodbath in which nobody wins?

Carmichael: First, my name is Mr. Carmichael. And secondly, Black people will survive America.

Reporter 2: What accomplishments or objectives do you visualize from the retaliation? What do you think you’ll accomplish?

Carmichael: If a Black man can’t do nothing in this country, then we will stand up on our feet and die like men. If that’s our only act of manhood, then God damn it, we’re going to die. Tired of living on our stomachs.

Reporter 3: Do you fear for your life?

Carmichael: The hell with my life! You should fear for yours. I know I’m going to die. I know I’m gonna die. [Applause.]

***

Newkirk: Stokely’s speech immediately made the rounds on radio and television. White politicians and no small number of Black leaders condemned him. Even Sammy Davis Jr. came out to tell militants to try and keep the peace.

Sammy Davis Jr.: Now is the time for the militant leaders to say, “All right, baby; let’s hold ourselves. You’re angry; you’re mad, man—let’s hold it now and see if whitey’s going to come up with it.”

Newkirk: Stokely Carmichael had been waiting for years. He had been waiting since he crossed the bridge in Selma, since he inspired people in Mississippi with Black Power. He was tired of waiting. He was trying to reach others who he thought might be impatient too: young folks who gravitated to Black Power—kids like Theophus Brooks.

Theophus Brooks: We looked at it this way: Martin Luther King, we respected him but he was soft. We look at Malcolm X, Black Panthers, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael—we looked at them like that was our heroes. Man we loved them. Martin Luther King, we looked at him as being a good person, a nice person, but he weak and he soft. You know, turn the other cheek and all that.

Newkirk: Theophus Brooks was a student at Cardozo High School, just a few blocks away from the epicenter of the riots in D.C. Before the assassination, he didn’t follow news about Jim Crow or voting rights or integration. He was too busy with running the streets, and chasing girls.

Brooks: First time I ever saw a gun, a girl put a derringer on me in the cafeteria because I was messing with another girl. And she found out and pulled a derringer on me. I was scared to death.

Newkirk: Also, football. He was a star safety for Cardozo High School.

Brooks: All of a sudden, in 11th grade—something clicked in my head. And not only did I go football crazy, but I turned into a vicious-type ballplayer. I don’t know what happened.

Newkirk: On the first night of riots, Theophus stayed home. A lot of his friends did. He still had to go to class in the morning. City officials hoped keeping schools open would keep kids off the streets. But it didn’t work.

Brooks: I was in the classroom at about 10, 11 o’clock in the day, and people ran in to say, “They rioting on 14th Street. Man, they stealin’ everything!”

Newkirk: By late morning, the students in Cardozo were out in the streets. Theophus was with them.

Brooks: It seemed like everybody broke out like it was recess. We broke out and went up to 14th Street.

Newkirk: What did you see when you got there?

Brooks: Maybe about 2,000 or 3,000 people. When I got up there, they had burned most everything down.

Lawson: Somebody hollered, “Get the white people; get the white people.” People started grabbing things, throwing at cars, trucks, at anybody that was driving was white.

Newkirk: Across town, on the east side of D.C., Vanessa Lawson was in the streets too. And she was angry. Her teacher used to go on and on about just how important King was. Her mother and grandmother loved King. And Vanessa was fed up with having to move to the projects and with how things were going in her life. So she chose to join the crowd.

Vanessa Lawson: And we participated. You know, I’m sorry to say I participated in that riot. I mean, I played a part in it.

Newkirk: In the Cardozo neighborhood, Theophus Brooks returned to the blocks that had burned just the night before. Many of the stores had already been cleaned out. But the students still wanted to do something.

Brooks: But when I got up there, a lot of stuff was gone. But then after that—it was maybe about 3:30, 4 o’clock—maybe 200 of us went to Cardozo. Now, if you know 13th Street at Cardozo, it’s a real hill going up.

Newkirk: Oh, yeah I know that hill.

Brooks: Okay, we were standing on each side of the hill throwing bricks at cars that looked like they had white people in it.

Newkirk: By the afternoon, Black neighborhoods in D.C. were back in full rebellion. The night before had all been unpredictable. It could’ve been a one-off thing. But the second night, April 5, was even more intense than the first. This would not be over soon.

Reporter: Tossing tear gas into the crowd. But that didn’t deter the Negroes … [shouting]

Reporter: … to see whether they could get a big radio–TV–record-player combination into a small, foreign-built car. It just wouldn’t fit.

Newkirk: Even in all the chaos, even as disturbances erupted in neighborhoods all across D.C., it was hard to imagine that this was the revolution that Stokely had promised. Theophus and his friends never got political. They were not being galvanized by a Black messiah—living or dead—to go to the White House or overthrow anybody. Theophus says they didn’t even really think much about King. Their response was more visceral. They stood on the street for hours, just throwing bricks. Because they could.

Brooks: And from 3:30 to about six, they must have broke about 100, 200 car windows.

Newkirk: He doesn’t think any of the drivers were seriously hurt, but still. The basic reality of the kids’ situation had been reversed. Police had always been untouchable. Across D.C., they were known for harassing and beating Black kids. But now the kids were throwing bricks at white folks’ cars and the police couldn’t do anything about it. It was exhilarating.

Brooks: They weren’t shooting anybody. It was like, Don’t do this; don’t do that. Stop, stop, stop this. You know, they wasn’t pulling out guns. And they arrested a few people, but it was just like a mob takeover. They took over and there weren’t nothing you could do about it.

Reporter 1: Aside from responding with tear gas, the officers generally ignored the bricks and bottles thrown at them. They knew that they were seriously understrength for any major outbreak of violence, and many of them were hoping for a call up of the National Guard or—what happened—the eventual deployment of Army troops.

Reporter 2: One policeman took off his gas mask, looked around, and asked if the National Guard had been called. “We need them,” he said. “We can’t hold this tonight. We’re losing.”

Newkirk: Frank Smith went out too. He thought that his duty as a SNCC veteran was to help keep people safe, or to organize them if he could. But he was skeptical that what he was seeing could turn into anything more.

Frank Smith: I don’t think that I ever thought this might be the revolution.

Newkirk: He was worried. The police were one thing, but he was afraid that people were going to get themselves hurt or killed when the military came.

Frank Smith: They got themselves in a position that no revolutionary army ever wants to be in, which is that it’s now facing down with an enemy with much more resources and much more gun power.

***

Scott Peters (journalist): Mayor Walter Washington has clamped a 5:30 p.m. curfew on the city. The presidential executive order has brought four companies of soldiers into the city. One is deployed around the downtown area; that includes the White House. Another is centered around the Capitol Hill. The other two are in the northwest section of the city. Additional soldiers are standing by for duty if needed. The president signed the order at the request of city officials.

Newkirk: As night fell and the hours went on, more and more students like Theophus Brooks poured into the streets. Protestors reignited the fires from the previous night and set new buildings ablaze.

Peters: Scott Peters, United Press International, the White House. President Johnson has ordered about 500 federal troops into Washington, D.C., in order to restore law to the city wracked by fires and looting.

Newkirk: The flames radiated out from the ghettos. They spread to just a few blocks away from the White House.

Peters: Two companies of soldiers are deployed in the worst-troubled area. One is near Capitol Hill, the fourth in the downtown area, which includes the White House.

Smoke from fires in downtown Washington is visible here at the White House. Police cars and ambulances are moving up and down the streets, the streets themselves jammed with traffic, the sidewalks crawling with people, some waiting for buses or trying to find taxis to go home. Some are spectators; some are looters. The White House gates are closed and White House policemen stand behind them. Normal routine has come to a halt in this part of the city. A group of Negro youths passed the White House gates a few minutes ago, carrying what looked to be transistor radios and other small appliances. They taunted White House police at the gates, one yelling “Shoot me! Shoot me!” while his companions laughed.

Newkirk: The police were outnumbered. Across the United States, fires burned in most big cities. A lot of the people on the streets were like Theophus Brooks and Vanessa Lawson: young folks who were just out there, because they could be. But politicians worried that Stokely’s vision might be coming true, that riots might be sustained, organized, even revolutionary. Governors mobilized state National Guards and started calling the White House for military assistance.

John Dennis (journalist): This is John Dennis in Boston for United Press International. Several thousand Massachusetts National Guardsmen are on the alert here in the Boston area tonight …

Dean Bailey (journalist): Dean Baily, United Press International, Chicago. Mayor Daley, in conjunction with his superintendent of police, was asking that the National Guard be put on standby alert …

Dennis: … Lieutenant Governor Francis Sargent, says the move “is a precautionary measure.”

Bailey: … Acting Illinois Governor Sam Shapiro acceded to the request, and 6,000 Guardsmen are assembling at armories. They may be needed on the streets. Fires have broken out. There has been shooting; there has been looting. Most of the trouble is concentrated on the West Side, a predominantly Negro area. All Chicago firemen are on duty.

***

Newkirk: By the time Vanessa Lawson got back inside, it was dark. She heard her mother talking on the phone to her brother Vincent. He went to high school out by his grandmother’s house off H Street. They were rioting there too. People were breaking into the stores in the business district, including the department store where Vanessa’s family shopped.

Vanessa Lawson: He left and went looting. Him and his friends went out. Morton’s was one of the places he went. He had other stuff too, so he called my mom and told her, “I got you three boxes, the right size and the right color.”

Newkirk: He was proud. He and Vanessa had seen their mother struggling. They’d tried to give her their own money to buy stockings when she could only afford a pair or two. And now Vincent had three boxes, the right size and color. Their mom couldn’t even be that mad.

Lawson: And she’s laughing and crying at the same time and telling him, “Do not leave back out that house, you hear me? Do not leave back out that house.”

Newkirk: But then, a little while later, Vanessa’s grandma called to say that Vincent had left again. That he was back out on the streets.

Lawson: My grandmother called and said he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the house. And the kids are running around like crazy.

Newkirk: Vanessa’s mother was worried. She lashed out. She put the responsibility on Vincent’s older brother Glen to find him.

Lawson: She told him, “Go get your brother.” And he left; he left back out.

Newkirk: In darkness, as chaos was spreading, Glen tried to make it six miles—over to 8th and H Streets, the neighborhood where their grandmother lived. He was trying to do what his mother told him: Don’t come home without Vincent.

Lawson: And he’s looking everywhere for him. And, you know, and the National Guard’s coming out now and they want everybody off the streets.

Newkirk: By the end of the night, nobody had heard from Vincent.

Lawson: And I just remember, you know, it’s just like hours and hours and hours. He didn’t ever come home.

Newkirk: Vanessa often talks about how she and Vincent had this, like, spiritual or metaphysical connection. She says she could feel how he was feeling, even when they weren’t together. And on that night, she felt … dread.

Lawson: Let me tell you, his heart was beating so fast. His heart was beating so fast. My brother’s heart was beating so fast. I’m sitting at home calm, and I’m feeling my heart is racing. I said, you know, something is wrong. Something is wrong. I kept telling my mother, something is wrong.

Newkirk: They all wanted to go back out and look. To keep searching until they found Vincent or could find out what had happened to him. But by then, troops from the Army’s 82nd Airborne division had been fully mobilized. That evening, their boots marched and their trucks rolled down D.C. streets—the streets where Vincent and Vanessa raked leaves, where Theophus played football, where Tony reported for his college paper. Army units, held back in reserve from Vietnam, swept across the district using tear gas, isolating all those Black neighborhoods from one another. The occupation of the city was beginning.

Stokely Carmichael demands “Black Power”

At a speech during the “March Against Fear” in Mississippi, on June 16, 1966, Carmichael uses the phrase Black Power.

The FBI sets counterintelligence goals

A month before King’s assassination, on March 4, 1968, the FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, issues a memo cautioning against allowing King to become a “messiah.”

Howard University students react to King’s assassination

The morning after King’s assassination, D.C. students walk out of class en masse. Howard University’s newspaper, The Hilltop, publishes an editorial criticizing nonviolence as a path to liberation.

Holy Week: Kingdom

2023-03-14T06:00:00-04:00

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts

Child 1: Mmm, yes.

Journalist: What did you do?

Child 1: I did a little looting, but I gave it back.

Journalist: You gave it back?

Child 1: Yes, but I think it’s all right to loot some people if they’re gonna stay open. But to burn it down, no. I caught a man in a Hahn’s shoe store trying to burn that down, and I put it out.

Journalist: You put out the fire?

Child 1: Yes, sir.

Journalist: What do you think? Were you involved in any of this looting?

Child 2: Yes, sir.

Journalist: What did you take?

Child 2: Oh, a safe and a couple—

Journalist: You took a safe?

Child 2: As a little safe that you put money in, and a couple more stuff. And I think they should have had the riot, but they shouldn’t have—

Journalist: Why should they have had the riot, young fella?

Child 2: Since Martin Luther King got shot, everybody seemed like they wanted to riot. I say that. I’m not saying that they should have had it, but if they did have the riot, they shouldn’t have burned.

Vann R. Newkirk II: The burning of Washington city, in 1814, by the British felt to many like the end of an era, the beginning of a new one. That sense of unease motivated our national anthem, the “Star Spangled Banner.” After fleeing Washington and seeing American troops then beat back the British in Baltimore, Francis Scott Key felt the triumph of the dawn’s early light.

One hundred and fifty-four years later, D.C. burned again. In the middle of it all, people tried to step back and think about what it meant for this country, this democracy. They tried to find meaning in the chaos of those spring nights. There were big, serious news specials and lofty speeches in the halls of the Capitol. But the recollections that interest me most come from a group of children at the heart of the riots. In the Cardozo district, primary and junior-high-school teachers started asking their students what they thought and documenting their replies.

Teacher: Here’s an interesting comment from another fifth grader, who is talking about Martin Luther King: “His dream wasn’t like most dreams. It wasn’t just him in the dream. He wanted everybody in his dreams. He wanted to take us to the promised land with him. Now he has left for the promised land, and we have to follow.”

Newkirk: Kids as young as 6 and 7 responded to prompts from their teachers about what they had witnessed in the streets, through drawings, poetry, through essays. Reporters from ABC were so captivated by this experiment that they came to see it.

Teacher: When we ask children the saddest thing that they saw, one child in the first grade responded that he was very sad when he saw three Negro boys beat up a white man and stab him. And then we asked also, “What was the happiest thing that you saw?” And children said, “People helping each other, giving them food and things of this type.”

Newkirk: The drawings are vivid and incredibly raw. There’s one drawing of a grocery store, a Safeway, where people are lined up outside, carrying food away. One woman has a speech bubble that says, “I got a lot of meat.” A guy answers her and says, “Let’s get more meat.” Across the street there’s a police car with its own speech bubble: “I will shoot tear gas.”

Teacher: I really think the children did a better job with the drawing of pictures. Because of the area where these children lived, many of them could see the flames coming from their houses, or they lived nearby where things were burning.

Newkirk: There are drawings of the first rocks being thrown at the Peoples Drug Store, images of soldiers, crayon pictures of fires. There are sketches of the soul brother signs people put in their windows, like lamb’s blood marking homes during Passover. One of the most haunting pictures is a pen drawing of the G. C. Murphy’s store on 14th and Irving. It shows the store burned and collapsing. There’s a body inside, trapped under the rubble. The newspapers say that two teenage Black boys died there in the fire. One was never identified. There’s a Bed Bath & Beyond there now.

Some teachers asked their kids a simple question: How did they feel? A few said they just wanted to be in clean, safe neighborhoods. Some said they were still sad, or still angry, or just trying to hold on to King’s message of nonviolence. Some hated the looting; some defended it. The answer that sticks with me is from one student who didn’t care about any of that. They wrote, “Right now I would like to forget about Black Power, soul, and all the burning of stores. I would like to forget about 14th Street.”

***

Journalist: Late last night, Washington’s deputy mayor, Thomas Fletcher, said that the city was so quiet that it's eerie, like a science-fiction movie. This morning, too, is quiet, sunny, cool. The jonquils blooming, a fresh breeze scattering the blossoms of cherry and mock orange and dogwood. But unlike other crisp spring mornings, soldiers are walking post up and down the avenues and streets, walking in pairs along F. One walks alone at the intersection of 14th and Pennsylvania Avenue. But there are 24 soldiers to the block …

Newkirk: In Black D.C., April 7 felt like a time for forgetting, if just for a moment. People were cleaning up shops and homes, sweeping glass and bricks and charred wood from the streets. Church bells rang as people walked to services to lay down their branches for Palm Sunday.

Journalist: Normally, this would be a special day for churchgoing, Palm Sunday. Today, there was another reason: a national day of mourning for Martin Luther King.

Newkirk: Some of the shoes that crunched on sidewalks were nicer than usual. There were brand-new stockings with no runs, dresses and sweaters that fit, with no patches. If you squinted and ignored the soldiers, maybe you could believe this was just like any other holiday. But in pretty much every church in America that Sunday, the sermons were a little different.

Preacher 1: Oh, Heavenly Father, be mindful of the soul of Dr. Martin Luther King, who sacrificed his life for the sanctification of thy holy name.

Preacher 2: Martin Luther King’s death deprives America of one of its outstanding spiritual leaders.

Preacher 3: Are we satisfied to pass along the poverty as we go along our palm march? Or do we want to march down the road of prosperity for all men?

Ralph David Abernathy: They thought that they could kill our movement by killing you, Martin. But, Martin, I want you to know that Black people love you.

Newkirk: In Atlanta, at West Hunter Street Baptist Church, Reverend Ralph David Abernathy gave a sermon directly addressed to his old friend. But it was also aimed at what was going on in places like D.C. He tried to reconcile what had happened on the streets with the nonviolent philosophy he still believed in.

Abernathy: It may seem that they are denying our nonviolence. But they are acting out their frustration. Poor people have had a hard time during these difficult days.

Newkirk: Palm Sunday in the church is supposed to symbolize the ultimate victory of Jesus over the material world, and to foreshadow his role as the spiritual conqueror of sin. In his sermon, Abernathy recast King as redeemer—conqueror of the sin of racism.

Abernathy: What we know, Martin, because we love people, is that after the bidding of frustration, there will be the need for reconciliation.

Crowd: Mm, hmm.

Abernathy: There you will be invisible, but real. Black and white will need you to take them from their shame and reconcile them into you and onto our master, Jesus Christ.

Newkirk: If there would be any reconciliation in D.C., its time was due. It wouldn’t just be a reconciliation between Black and white, but between two visions of what the city was. D.C. was supposed to be a model city for its thriving Black middle class. It was a city that was geographically in the South but seemed to rise above Jim Crow. There were Black doctors and Black lawyers and even a Black mayor (even though he wasn’t elected). For many Black people, life in D.C. had seemed like a safe haven, a bubble. But now, just like the kids in Cardozo schools, people in D.C. were forced to wake up from their dreams.

***

Newkirk: Part 6: “Kingdom.”

***

Roland Smith: My father, my grandfather, and my great-grandfather were born in the district. Actually, I’m a fourth-generation Washingtonian.

Newkirk: Wow. Fourth generation. I don’t meet a whole lot of those.

Smith: Yeah. It’s rare.

Newkirk: What neighborhood?

Smith: Well, we started off in northeast—far northeast—and then northwest. I went to Calvin Coolidge High School.

Newkirk: When I talk to old-school Washingtonians, they have a way of talking about “old D.C.,” before the riots, about what was lost in the fires. Roland Smith was born in D.C., and his family roots there go way back. Family legend has it that they moved to the city from a plantation in northern Virginia, but nobody really knows. The point is, Roland is D.C.

Smith: I think about D.C. back then as a sleepy southern town.

Newkirk: He’s got classic memories of just riding around D.C. on his bike as a kid. It’s never been a really big city, but it felt smaller then. There were no blocks dedicated to lobbyist offices, fewer condos, less traffic. Outside of government buildings, most of the town was residential. Roland was born in one of the first public-housing developments for Black people in all of Washington.

Smith: And that was at a public-housing unit, Langston Terrace Dwellings in northeast D.C., right on Benning Road.

Newkirk: Roland’s family was built on a foundation of civil service that was really only possible in D.C. His grandfather was a messenger on Capitol Hill who also tended bar sometimes for Hill staff. Roland’s mother was a government secretary. His father served in World War II, and as a disabled veteran, worked three jobs to save up enough money to buy a house.

Smith: It was a big deal in our family because not very—most of our family rented their houses or rented their apartments. They didn’t own.

Newkirk: For the family, it was a step up into a life they’d always dreamed of. The house became a way station for family members from all different sorts of situations. It was the kind of pathway that lots of Black families with deep roots wanted to follow. Taquiena Boston’s family was one of those.

Taquiena Boston: My mother grew up in southwest, which they refer to as “Old Southwest.” That was a neighborhood where people were in and out of each other’s houses. Your door was kept unlocked.

Newkirk: Like Roland, Taquiena also grew up in northeast, in apartments in Brentwood. Her family didn’t really have money. Her dad drove trash trucks. But still, her parents had plans for their kids. Taquiena’s mom took her and her younger sister to go get library cards as soon as they could read. They learned nursery rhymes. They read The Wizard of Oz.

Boston: My dad brought home some Encyclopedia Britannicas that were going to be discarded. They all had the front covers taken off, but he brought them home for me to have a set of encyclopedias.

Newkirk: Taquiena’s family didn’t live too far from the H Street Corridor, where Vanessa Lawson and her brother Vincent were born, the area where they started their first hustles raking leaves and carrying groceries.

Vanessa Lawson: Oh, my God. It was wonderful. I wish I could have raised my kids or my grandkids—they could have been raised in a neighborhood like I was. Everybody knew everybody’s name. Everybody knew everybody’s business. Everybody watched each other’s kids.

Newkirk: Vanessa can remember the details like it was yesterday. Before her parents split, they lived off H Street. They were behind the strip of Black businesses and shops. There were neat rows of breadbox houses with green lawns. Everybody went and worshiped together on Sundays, in a church right on the block.

Lawson: They had a basket full of musical instruments and you could grab what you wanted when you came in the church. And you knew, though, when you went in there, what was expected of you. Okay? So no horseplaying and none of that kind of stuff. And I got to say, everybody respected that little church.

Newkirk: You are painting such an amazing picture of life. I feel like I can put it all in my head right now. I feel like I’m there.

Lawson: I get chills talking to you every time I do. It’s just so surreal, you know? It was a good place, a good time in my life.

Newkirk: Vanessa’s parents came up from rural Virginia before she was born. They left behind a state where poll taxes were still used to keep Black folks from voting. They were drawn towards a city where Black theaters played Black movies on U Street; where families like Roland Smith’s could own houses in neighborhoods full of other Black homeowners; where maybe, just maybe, they could have the lives America promised its citizens. They were part of a wave of Black people that also included the parents of Theophus Brooks. His folks arrived in D.C. from North Carolina, before he was born.

Theophus Brooks: My mother’s from Goldsboro.

Newkirk: Goldsboro!

Brooks: My father’s from Hertford.

Newkirk: Oh yeah. I’m from North Carolina.

Brooks: Yeah, yeah. I got a lot of my cousins down there. Matter of fact, my uncle, my father’s brother, had 10 girls, no boys—10!

Newkirk: For Theophus, North Carolina might as well have been a world away. He lived in Cardozo, the Black enclave within the Black metropolis.

Newkirk: What was the city like back then?

Brooks: Oh, man, it was great. They had respectful families. You can almost leave your doors open because your neighbors could knock on the door and come on in. You know, a lot of kids ate breakfast and dinner at my house. I went over to their house. We respect everybody’s parents.

The ’60s to me, it was the best time because, in D.C., we didn’t have no racial problems. Never heard anybody call me a [N-word] because you didn’t have that in D.C.

Newkirk: It was all Black folks.

Brooks: Yeah, it was mostly Black.

Newkirk: With Theophus, it’s the same story as Roland and Taquiena and Vanessa. It’s like they’re describing a Black fairy tale. And in all of those tales, you don’t hear much about the bogeyman of Jim Crow.

Brooks: We livin’ in D.C.; we had all the rights. I mean, we didn’t think about being treated nasty because, you know, when you in this environment, you don’t think about that. I’m 73 and I’ve been in D.C. all my life. I never experienced racism in D.C.

Boston: My mother said she’d never, never have grown up feeling bad about being Black. She felt worse about being what she called “low-class.” Of course, they didn’t live around white people, right. So maybe that was why.

Roland Smith: I think that we were kind of insulated to some extent from some of that, early on.

Newkirk: For Theophus Brooks, Roland Smith, Taquiena Boston, and Vanessa Lawson, this was D.C., Black D.C. It’s what so many parents and grandparents had come to the city for, what people were still taking trains and buses to the city for: a safe haven.

Still, when the March on Washington came to town in 1963, a lot of Black Washingtonians were interested in what the speakers had to say about integration, jobs, and freedom. Roland Smith was a teenager then. He wanted to go, but his mother was afraid there would be violence. He snuck out anyways.

Roland Smith: I went to the March on Washington. So I was there. I was there listening to the stories of the marchers and what they had sacrificed to get there.

It was surreal. There were a lot of people, but there wasn’t a lot of noise. There was a reverence about the whole process. It seems to me there was some singing, and I just remember that this was something special. But I didn’t fully understand the implications.

Newkirk: You didn’t have a sense of sort of being in this historical moment?

Smith: Yeah, I think I did. I felt that more as we saw the news, you know, kind of post-march and how it was treated. And I was thinking I was just glad I was there. It was hot, though. It was. [Laughs.] It was a very hot Washington summer day. [Laughs.]

Newkirk II: When did your mother find out you were gone?

Smith: When I got home [Laughs.] later that evening. [Laughs.]

Newkirk: About 10 percent of the marchers in ’63 were native Washingtonians like Roland. It was a moment of pride for them—hosting, supporting, and marching. But for many residents, especially younger people, the march also helped highlight the truth about the D.C. fairy tale—the apparent freedom and prosperity they had, had limits.

March on Washington speaker: Brother John Lewis. [Applause.]

Newkirk: At the march, civil-rights hero John Lewis stepped up to the podium and started talking about voter disenfranchisement.

John Lewis: One man, one vote. It is the democratic cry. It is ours too. It must be ours. [Applause.]

Newkirk: One man, one vote. He was talking about the Deep South. But he was also speaking in a majority-Black city that didn’t even elect its own leaders and had no representation in Congress. There was no home rule. D.C. was controlled by a committee in the House that was full of segregationists. Washingtonians had just barely gotten the right to vote for president. For Roland and some others like him, the contradiction was glaring. How could D.C. be the Black metropolis if Black people couldn’t even govern themselves?

Roland Smith: You know, you think about things like the March on Washington and the role that that played with all the people descending upon the district. And I think, one of the issues for the district was not being able to vote. So, that was, home rule, was a big issue. And so I think that fomented some of the discontent.

Newkirk: As they grew into adolescence, Roland, Taquiena, Vanessa, and Theophus saw these contradictions more clearly. They were born in a city that had once been tightly segregated, but while they were all still kids, white folks started leaving by the thousands. They took their tax dollars and resources with them. The money moved to suburbs in Virginia and Maryland, where Black kids from D.C. were most definitely not welcome.

Taquiena Boston saw her mother’s old neighborhood paved over, by “urban renewal.”

Theophus Brooks learned to stay away from certain parts of Maryland.

For Black families like Vanessa’s, it became easier to fall down the ladder than to climb. When her parents got divorced and the kids had to move with their mother to the projects, her brother Vincent was angry about the changes.

Vanessa Lawson: My uncles and stuff came, and they packed us up and we moved. And when we got to where it was, my brother said, “All these places look alike. How are we going to know which house is ours?” kind of thing, you know. And he was the smart one. And the thing is, when we got over there and moved in, once he started learning the reality of this move, and that our new residence is in the projects—you know, the family decline—it’s like, he blamed it on my dad. So he was mad at him for most of the time after that.

Newkirk: The Lawson family found out that the paradise of Black D.C. was more of a limbo. The Black middle class was still thriving and glamorous but grew more distant from working-class spaces. The rise of television made it impossible to miss what was happening in the Deep South, and for some young Black Washingtonians, it started to shine a light on continued segregation in their own city. But the intense poverty of the ghettos was more like what was happening up north. Roland Smith says watching the riots there, in ’66 and ’67, was like holding up a mirror.

Roland Smith: Hearing about the unrest and the riots and the things going on in the South, and even in Detroit, I mean, you think about all those things that were going on back in the ’60s—early ’60s—and those were all kind of swirling in the mindset of folks.

Newkirk: What’s your family think about those? I had a big argument over the last weekend with some people who were more “don’t rock the boat” versus people who were behind it.

Smith: Oh, yeah. We had that. I mean, there was a lot of that. And I think that the divide actually started to break along generational lines.

Newkirk: D.C.’s ghettos never did join northern cities in riots in the mid-’60s. It’s possible that the old mystique of the Black middle class and the magic of the fairy tale kept the city in place, kept hope in place, even in the teeth of poverty. That’s why King chose the city when he announced his Poor People’s Campaign. It had been planned to kick off in late April of 1968.

Reporter: There are large Negro neighborhoods here in Washington, like any major city. In fact, this is the only major city in the nation with a Negro majority, and it has a Negro mayor. There are four sections, and there are Negro middle-class sections. Washington, in many senses, is the middle-class Negro capital of the world.

Newkirk: The idea was to use the vibrant, Black-middle-class institutions as an organizing base for highlighting poverty on the doorstep of the nation’s capital. To do that nonviolently, King and the SCLC had wanted to harness whatever spirit of reconciliation had kept the city together.

But as the church bells rang after Palm Sunday services, the world began to spin again. Parishioners went back to ghettos, business districts, middle-class neighborhoods that had been burned. The fairy tale was over.

***

Newkirk: Just after the assassination, John Burl Smith had been crushed. He and other leaders of the Memphis Invaders had tried to bring Black Power organizing to the sanitation workers’ strike. They clashed with the establishment civil-rights leaders, but after he and his co-leader, Charles Cabbage, met with King in his motel room, they walked away thinking that Martin Luther King had taken them seriously. John believed it was the beginning of something special.

John Burl Smith: When we left the room, Charles and I was feeling really great, man. We had just become a part of the coalition of the No. 1 Black leader in the country, you know? That to me was as good as it gets. And when we get home, and the announcement that he’s been assassinated, it’s like everything’s fallen apart.

Newkirk: The Invaders’ last interaction with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had been back at the demonstration on March 28, which turned into a riot. King had called the meeting partly to get the Invaders under his chain of command. And he let the media know that he would be working with them.

Reporter: One of the ironies that Dr. King was killed here, is that his last few days were spent trying to negotiate with the militants in Memphis and elsewhere, hoping to find some agreement, some way that they could all work together …

Newkirk: But other people in the SCLC had not endorsed that plan. They didn’t like or trust the Invaders. John says that he had gone into hiding because he thought SCLC members believed he might have been working to set King up.

Burl Smith: There were actually people in SCLC—I’m not going to give any names, but they spent, oh, the next month or some saying that we were a part of the assassination, that we had set Dr. King up to getting him down to the Lorraine.

Newkirk: John didn’t trust the SCLC, either. He thought for sure that they would just hang the sanitation workers out to dry, or would force them to settle with Memphis Mayor Henry Loeb.

Burl Smith: Oh, I figured that Loeb would probably win and that the strike was probably over, because the people left in charge were not people committed to the workers.

Newkirk: In his final address, the “Mountaintop” speech, King had promised to come back to lead another march in Memphis. It was a firm commitment that his involvement in the strike wouldn’t just be a cameo or a detour, but a central piece of his growing Poor People’s Campaign. John didn’t believe the new SCLC leader, Ralph David Abernathy, or King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, would keep that promise. But then he heard the SCLC announce that they were coming back to Memphis.

Ralph David Abernathy: We will conduct our march in support of the sanitation workers here in Memphis as scheduled on Monday, April the 8th. It will be a silent march in his memory. We will resume work on his Poor People’s Campaign in Washington in the hopes that this nation and its Congress will legislate the necessary economic reforms to put an end to poverty in this nation.

Newkirk: Like always, the organizers relied on local groups and volunteers to be marshals for the march, to move people along and keep order. The marshals would be especially important this go-around, after the disaster of the last march. John says, the SCLC didn’t reach out to the Invaders for this role, but he and his friends showed up anyways.

Burl Smith: Nobody ever reached out to us and said, We would like you to do this. Be there. But because of our promise to Dr. King, we did what we promised, which was to be marshals.

Newkirk: The hope was that the shock of King’s death would push the Memphis mayor to give in quickly. But that morning, the marchers got bad news.

Art McAloon (journalist): At the center of today’s parade and last week’s tragic events: the garbage workers’ strike. They broke off negotiations at 6 o’clock this morning with no settlement in sight. The demonstration was quiet …

Newkirk: Still, even though the sanitation workers were no closer to getting a deal, the march was important. Civil-rights organizations could keep public pressure on Mayor Loeb and could use the national spotlight on Memphis after the assassination to really bring the heat. And now, the people marching weren’t just Memphians and civil-rights activists. Thousands of people flew in from around the country to take part.

Percy Sutton (public figure): I’m absolutely fascinated by the size of the crowd. I didn’t expect a crowd this large in Memphis. Are most of these people from Memphis, or have many of them come from other parts of the country?

Robert Richards (journalist): I understand, sir, that about 6,000 have come from out of town.

Sutton: I think that’s beautiful. I think it shows the feeling throughout the country of the need for unity and accomplishment. I’m very happy to see this.

Newkirk: The marchers set out. Ralph David Abernathy and Coretta Scott King led, with three of her children walking alongside her and Harry Belafonte.

Art McAloon: It’s a gray, overcast day here in Memphis, as thousands of the city’s Negroes gather to march in the interrupted sanitation men’s demonstration. At the head of the line, with Mrs. Martin Luther King, will be Reverend Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King’s successor. Between the two, there will be an empty space, symbolizing the absence of Dr. King. March officials estimate as many as 40,000 …

Newkirk: They wore sharp suits and hats and overcoats in the cold rain. They moved quietly down the street, no chants or slogans or singing. The march was supposed to be a rejection of the riots gripping over 100 cities. It was also supposed to be a repudiation of the last march in Memphis, where John’s group had played a role in the chaos. But here he was, serving as a marshal, guiding the march and keeping it together.

John Burl Smith: We did what we could to keep the march moving and orderly and that kind of thing. But—

Newkirk: So you felt like you were upholding the promise?

Burl Smith: Yes.

Newkirk: Did anybody look at you sideways for showing up?

Burl Smith: No, no. I think most people understood. And they were—I mean, the Invaders were supported very well in Memphis. Young people were, felt, very heroic in terms of the invaders.

Newkirk: Journalists followed the entire march, pulling aside people and asking them questions with somewhat obvious answers.

Reporter: Did it have any personal meaning to you?

Man: Did it have a personal feeling to me? Sure. I always have a personal feeling, because I am a Negro. It is something maybe you don’t understand by being white.

Newkirk: Watching the footage of the march, there aren’t really a whole lot of white participants. But the Black people who showed up didn’t care. This march was for them, by them.

Reporter: Were you disappointed at the fact that the turnout of the white community was relatively small? I didn’t see too many whites marching.

Woman: Today, no, not really. I wasn’t disappointed at all. Because that’s something, here in Memphis that is not a disappointment to us.

Reporter: You didn’t expect it?

Woman: I guess not.

Newkirk: The march stopped in front of the pavilion by city hall. Then the leaders got up to speak. Ralph David Abernathy was the new leader and face of the SCLC, but he wasn’t the main draw this Monday morning.

Corretta Scott King: I was impelled to come.

Newkirk: Coretta Scott King had actually been criticized for deciding to come to the march. For deciding to be in the movement, instead of publicly grieving and caring for her children.

Scott King: Three of our four children are here today, and they came because they wanted to come too. [Applause.] And I want you to know that in spite of the times that he had to be away, his family, his children knew their daddy loved them, and the time that he spent with them was well spent.

Newkirk: Coretta Scott King came to clearly repeat King’s demands. They weren’t just the civil-rights laws that had already been passed or the new housing bill that President Johnson was rushing to pass. King was calling for transformation, for real economic change for workers and the poor.

Scott King: Every man deserves a right to a job or an income so that he can pursue liberty, life, and happiness. [Applause.] Our great nation, as he often said, has the resources. But his question was: Do we have the will? [Applause.]

Newkirk: Just like Abernathy did on Palm Sunday, Coretta Scott King tied her husband’s life, death, and legacy to the celebration of Holy Week. He might not be resurrected in flesh, but her hope was that she could call on America to revive the policy he’d fought for.

Scott King: Somehow I hope in this resurrection experience, the will will be created within the hearts and minds, and the souls and spirits, of those who have the power to make these changes come about. [Applause.]

Newkirk: The march ended without any drama. Marshals like John Burl Smith guided people off the streets, and Abernathy and the King family traveled back to Atlanta to prepare for the funeral. Riots in many cities still blazed. But it all felt like one phase of grief had transitioned to another. It was time to reckon with how the assassination and the riots had changed Black America, how they had changed all of America. John was left wondering what might have been.

John Burl Smith: Had he been able to do what he was planning to do, we would be looking at a different America.

Newkirk: To John, that new America would have been achieved by bridging the gap between nonviolence and self-defense, between the old guard and the militants. Perhaps in the silent march, as Invaders walked in their military jackets beside the SCLC in their suits, he saw a glimmer of it.

Burl Smith: Black Power would have been able to show that we could work with Dr. King, we could work with nonviolence, and we could actually be nonviolent, but we were definitely not going to be submissive and passive.

Newkirk: John never got to see that America. Nobody did. The next day, the nation would lay King to rest. All the talk in the movement and in Washington was of how they would keep his dream alive, how they could still overcome. But John worried that the dream might be buried with the man.

Taquiena Boston

a 13-year-old from Washington, D.C., receives a diary from her mother for Christmas in 1967. She begins journaling about her life, and includes her observations about King’s assassination and the days that followed.

Roland Smith

a 22-year-old student at Bowie State, in Maryland, is arrested the day of King’s assassination while leading student protesters at the Maryland capitol.

John Burl Smith

One day before King’s funeral, on April 8, John Burl Smith serves as a marshal for a silent march held in King’s memory in Memphis, Tennessee.

Holy Week: Covenant

2023-03-14T06:00:00-04:00

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Stokely Carmichael: For us, the real funeral for Dr. King, the funeral pyre, was the burning of the fires of the cities—the teeming anger of the people. And I remember, while driving from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta, I saw smoke for the entire trip in the car. They were, everywhere, putting Dr. King to rest, giving his proper burial. When I arrived in Atlanta for the funeral, for all practical purposes, it was anticlimactic. I’d already seen the funeral from Washington to Atlanta.

***

Vann R. Newkirk II: Tuesday, April 9, 1968.

Five days after King was killed, Stokely Carmichael looked on as he was laid to rest. The services were held at the church King pastored with his father, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta. A crowd of people swelled outside the church as far as the eye could see—over 100,000 people, one of the largest funerals for a private citizen in American history. They were all dressed up in their Sunday finest: kids in patent-leather shoes and vests, white ribbons in the girls’ hair. Dignitaries pulled up in black cars and snaked through the crowd. There’s George Romney, Bobby Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Thurgood Marshall. The vice president, Hubert Humphrey, showed up. It seemed like all the leaders in America were there, except President Johnson.

Joseph Califano: There’s a whole history of that. I mean, Nixon’s people calling and saying, you know, you could take Nixon and Bobby Kennedy together with you and Humphrey and take them all down. And it would show that the country is together.

Newkirk: Johnson’s top domestic adviser, Joe Califano, his right-hand man, says that plan didn’t work out for the president. Johnson had been on the outs with King and the SCLC before the assassination, and he heard (through the FBI’s COINTELPRO sources) that King’s people were planning to snub him.

Califano: Johnson didn’t want to do it. First of all, he had the Secret Service going crazy about the possibility that he would do it. But secondly, he just didn’t think anything would come of it. It wouldn’t help, and it could hurt him, so he sent Humphrey.

Newkirk: President Johnson and his staff watched the funeral the same way millions of Americans did: on TV.

Ralph David Abernathy: I am the resurrection and the life, saith the lord.

Newkirk: Watching the news footage, inside the church, as big as it is, it looks packed. Coretta Scott King is wearing a black veil. She and her children file in. She’s being held steady by her brother-in-law, Reverend A. D. King, but he doesn’t look too steady himself. Standing in the pulpit is Ralph David Abernathy.

Ralph David Abernathy: … in one of the darkest hours in the history of all mankind.

Juandalynn Abernathy: My father actually eulogized him. It was very difficult—very, very difficult.

Ralph David Abernathy: … a 20th-century prophet …

Newkirk: Juandalynn Abernathy was sitting in the pews with her sister and her mother. She and all the other kids were dressed in white. She was devastated. Her Uncle Martin was gone. And she was watching her father try to hold up an unimaginable burden.

Juandalynn Abernathy: But to see Daddy have to—his tears, you know—it was just, oh, for us … oh, it was horrible.

Ralph David Abernathy: Lift his voice and cry out to the pharaoh to let my people go.

Newkirk: After verses and hymns and eulogies, King’s pallbearers loaded his casket onto a cart. As Jesus had entered Jerusalem on a donkey, in peace, King toured his city one last time, drawn by mules. The procession went downtown, then to Morehouse College, his alma mater. Thousands of people followed on foot the whole four miles. At the college, his close mentor, former Morehouse president Benjamin Elijah Mays, delivered another eulogy.

Benjamin Elijah Mays: Make no mistake, the American people are, in part, responsible for Martin Luther King’s death. The assassin heard enough condemnation of King and Negroes to feel that he had public support.

Newkirk: From Ebenezer through the last tour of Atlanta, the ceremony lasted seven and a half hours. Outside Atlanta, lots of people tuned in to the whole thing. They listened on car radios. Families gathered on couches. People set up TVs outside in the projects.

In Brentwood, in northeast D.C., Taquiena Boston captured the event in her diary.

Taquiena Boston: For the first time, I cried because of the loss of Reverend King. When I think of him, I realize how wrong I was. All I’ve ever wanted is glory for myself.

Newkirk: She said it was time for the country to make a change. She was 13. In the Cardozo neighborhood in D.C., Theophus Brooks and his family watched too.

Theophus Brooks: We had a black-and-white TV. Everybody sit around it, quiet. Nobody—Oh, you think this?—No. Ain’t no discussion. Just quiet.

My mother and father didn’t discuss it. It would just be quiet, and we’d look at it. And the more we look at it, the more we realize this is terrible. You know, this is terrible. It’s terrible.

Newkirk: John Burl Smith, down in Memphis, had just finished working as a marshal in the silent march to commemorate King, and felt like he had kept his promise.

Newkirk: Did you watch King’s funeral?

John Burl Smith: No, I didn’t. I had an image of him that I don’t think anybody else had. I know what he went through and said during his last hours of life. That was my reasoning and justification.

Ralph David Abernathy: No crypt, no vault, no stone can hold his greatness, but we commit his body to the ground.

Newkirk: The funeral lasted until the evening. Even that night, National Guardsmen and Army troops still patrolled several cities and enforced curfews. But it was five days after King’s assassination. The riots were becoming old news. Some Americans were even ready to move past all the coverage about uprisings. After all, the Oscars were coming on TV later that week. But there was still one last struggle taking place: a struggle to make meaning of this thing, of the freedom movement and King’s life and what came after. Black America and white America were battling to define and claim whatever might be called the “soul of the nation.” Or maybe they were realizing that soul had departed.

***

Newkirk: Part 7: “Covenant.”

***

Newkirk: Later that night …

Broadcaster: Live and direct from Atlanta, Georgia…

Newkirk: Public radio stations in Atlanta, New York, and Boston started a simultaneous broadcast of a call-in show.

Broadcaster: … and New York City, with listener participation by telephone from around the nation. You’re listening to the first national “Dial in for Nonviolence.”

Newkirk: “Dial in for Nonviolence.” It started up after the funeral as a place where normal people could just vent, or even chat with some movement leaders—all spontaneously, on the fly.

Broadcaster: All you need to do is place a collect call to area code 212, calling number 749-3311 from anywhere in the United States.

Host: How do you do, miss? We’d like to hear what you have to say.

Female caller: Dr. Martin Luther King was a wonderful person. I am against violence, but it’s hard to live without it when there is prejudice around you in employment and etcetera.

Male caller: I would like to voice an opinion, if I may.

Host: Surely.

Male caller: This country is at a point of grave crisis, which will, I believe and regret, be resolved through violence.

Host: Well, my friend, you see, if there isn’t an alternative to violence—and in this case a kind of genocide—then I think that we’re a very unimaginative people. Dr. King offered us one possible way.

Male caller: Precisely. But he’s been offering this solution for almost 15 years, and …

Host: Well—

Male caller: … the accomplishments are minimal compared to the time that he’s been, you know, the literal time that he’s been operating.

Host: Well, well …

Newkirk: There was an anxiety underlying all the talk. Everyone was just trying to figure out what to do, how to live in a world that was changing under their feet. They discussed what policy might best continue King’s work.

Broadcaster: If everything in the Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders report was acted on, we would come so near to accomplishing all of the goals that Martin Luther King worked and died for—that so many other people worked and died for and sacrificed for. It’s all laid out in very simple form.

Newkirk: But by the time of the radio show, the path that the Kerner Commission recommended was basically closed. The day after the assassination, President Johnson had promised civil-rights leaders that he would press Congress for a major bill to transform Black America. By the time of the funeral, the White House had quietly dropped any such promise. But there was a civil-rights bill that addressed housing discrimination that was already on the Hill. It had already been drafted and considered in the Senate but stalled in the House without a vote scheduled. The White House decided maybe they could use the momentum after the assassination to get it through. It would be a big deal. But for lots of people, it wouldn’t be big enough.

Broadcaster: Now, this bill deals with the problem of open housing primarily, and this is an area in which there is undoubtedly a great deal of resistance. And so if you’ve got a new law and a mandate from Congress, it seems that you can get a little more action.

Broadcaster 2: The House Rules Committee has got it out for a vote tomorrow.

Broadcaster 3: But the people of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, their comments are that it was just tokenism.

Broadcaster 2: Well it’s tokenism for us but …

Newkirk: The call-ins lasted for hours into the night. It all seemed like part of the process of grief after the funeral, like a nightcap or a long talk with friends after the repast.

***

Newkirk: That same night, the White House was up late too. President Johnson had directed Joe Califano and his staff to focus on getting fair housing done.

Califano: I urged him to put out an executive order and he said no. He said it’ll be repealed by the next president. It’s too unpopular. We’ve got to get it passed.

Newkirk: After the White House watched the funeral, they called and checked in with members of Congress, hoping to see who would vote for what. They monitored TV and radio reports of the riots that were continuing in several cities. They also kept up with reports of retaliation by white citizens.

Reporter: White Night Riders cruised through Jacksonville last night in the midst of fire bombings and rock throwing and gunned down an 18-year-old Negro youth as he sat on his bicycle. The youth was dead on arrival at Baptist Hospital with a bullet wound in his head.

Newkirk: The reports were significant. They were evidence that white backlash to the riots was solidifying, and that public opinion was largely moving against Black uprisings, and any civil-rights policy. When it came to housing, white people who otherwise supported voting rights and civil rights could become hostile, quickly. And now, with many of them being told to arm themselves to ward off Black rioters, the situation was even worse.

Califano: The public sentiment in the context of the majority of the American people was certainly not to have fair housing.

Newkirk: People had been trying to end discrimination in housing for years. King had tried to force Johnson to pass fair housing by staging demonstrations in segregated neighborhoods in Chicago in 1966. People wore swastikas to march against him, and threw rocks and bricks. He said it was even worse than being sprayed by water hoses or attacked by dogs in the Deep South. The backlash in Chicago had been so bad that some White House staff thought housing might be a dead letter.

Califano: If we could have picked our choice, we would not have urged King to go to Chicago. We would have tried to get the bill passed and then go somewhere.

Newkirk: In ’66, a housing bill did make it to Congress, but it was killed in the Senate. Another bill stalled in ’67, and then again in early 1968. But then, just a month before the assassination, Johnson had a breakthrough. In the Senate, Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader from Illinois, had always opposed the plan. But Dirksen was dying from cancer.

Larry Levinson: Johnson called him and said, “Look, you helped me before on voting. I really need your help on housing.”

Newkirk: According to Larry Levinson, Johnson’s deputy counsel, the president thought there was a play there.

Levinson: “And I know you’re not feeling too well. And if you want to go to Walter Reed for a day or two to take some rest and get some medical attention, I’ll make sure that happens, but I really need to get your help on this.”

Newkirk: Dirksen had been hesitant. Some of Dirksen’s constituents were the same white suburbanites who had run King out of town in Illinois for wanting fair housing. But Johnson worked out a compromise.

Califano: He knew people in Congress, knew their strengths and weaknesses, and he used everything he knew.

Newkirk: The bill would exempt single-family houses sold directly by the family, which would make the bill less effective at stopping discrimination but maybe more palatable for white voters.

Levinson: They called it the Dirksen amendment.

Reporter: The bill contains the first comprehensive federal open-housing law of our century, unless the owner sells without a real-estate agent, or in small, owner-occupied boarding houses.

Newkirk: Dirksen finally agreed to get the bill through the Senate. Still, even with Dirksen and the Senate on board, and even with the bill weaker than before, the House Rules Committee would not bring it to a vote.

But after the assassination, Johnson was energized. He loved having the opportunity to be able to bully congressmen one more time, or persuade them over scotch and soda.

Califano: Johnson was really very good at taking a crisis and using it.

Newkirk: On April 5, the day Johnson had made big promises about finding money for a new social program, he also told the speaker of the House to pass fair housing.

Levinson: Johnson was saying, look, we need to focus our attention on the House and the House members and on the Rules Committee.

Newkirk: They needed to get more support for the bill, and they needed to do it quickly. Conservatives were already lining up to defeat the legislation.

Reporter: The opposition’s strategy was to convince House members that the times are too tense to make a level judgment on a civil-rights bill. And speaker after speaker cited riots in the streets, cities still smoldering, troops on the Capitol plaza.

Newkirk: And white voters were sending letters and even coming to D.C. to protest the bill.

Journalist: Their vehicles, buses, and Jeeps are parked outside the central plaza steps. If this was not testament enough to the racial turmoil in this city and in the nation, the letters have flooded into congressional offices. A majority of these letters are complaints, what one member calls backlash by zip code.

Newkirk: The White House and allies in Congress made another compromise to get more support from conservatives. They decided to add an anti-riot provision. It was nicknamed after the SNCC leader H. Rap Brown.

Journalist: The bill tries to control riots by making it a federal crime to travel across state lines or use radio or telephone across state lines to incite a riot or to make or sell firearms or explosives to use in a riot.

Newkirk: The compromises were enough to move some people. Richard Nixon endorsed fair housing after opposing it for years. Nixon’s support helped give some Republicans in Congress the green light. President Johnson’s bullying, begging, and charming did the rest. The day before the funeral, he picked up a vote from a Democratic congressman in Texas by promising a million-dollar grant for housing in his district. And then, the night of the funeral, the White House finally got the last committee vote.

Levinson: And there was a congressman named John Anderson who said, “You know, I’m going for the fair-housing bill, and I think we can get this bill out of the Rules Committee.”

Newkirk: The White House celebrated. The next day, the Fair Housing Act would finally pass in Congress, and fulfill some version of Johnson’s promise to get something done. On the streets, the mood wasn’t exactly celebratory. Almost a week after King was killed, Baltimore and Chicago were still raging. And in places like D.C., where the unrest was dying down, the aftermath was becoming clear.

Brooks: It was ashes—like somebody took an atomic bomb and blew it up.

Newkirk: Theophus Brooks walked through D.C. streets that were still choked with debris, smoke, and lingering tear gas.

Brooks: With all the excitement, the next week was like a graveyard. It was calm.

Newkirk: Not too far away from Cardozo, Howard University student Tony Gittens was surveying the damage. He’d been out there the night the riot started. He’d understood the rage that moved people. Still, it was hard to see.

Recently, I walked with him down 14th Street and he tried to tell me just how it all looked in ’68.

Tony Gittens: Some places were still smoldering. Things were burned down, torn down. There was no place to to live then. I mean, it was uninhabitable. You would have felt as though you were in World War II, going into some place that had been bombed and where a war had taken place. They tore it up.

Newkirk: At Howard, finals were coming. Tony was due to graduate. He and the rest of his class were getting ready to move out, to move on. But they were still angry.

Gittens: But collectively, we had a sense that it was the country doing that, killing him. I was surprised and pissed off. And we’re so, How the fuck?—I mean, I’m sorry. [Laughs.]

They do that, to this man? He was their guy, you know. He said, “No, no, no. Don’t get too violent,” and that they killed him was incredible. It was just incredible that that would happen.

Newkirk: Looking at the businesses in D.C. that had been burned down, Frank Smith was worried. He’d only been in D.C. for a little while, after working in the South with SNCC for so long. But this was his home now, and he knew life would be hard for the people he was trying to organize. Grocery stores were gone, other essential establishments too. And lots of the people who owned them looked like they were leaving the city for good.

Frank Smith: There was nothing to eat in most of the neighborhoods. The food stores were all gone. And these people were saying they weren’t coming back. They just said, “We’ve had enough of that. There’s not enough ‘there’ to come back to in the first place. And secondly, it’s dangerous. So we’re not coming back.”

Newkirk: He was watching the beginning of the most aggressive era of white flight in urban America.

Frank Smith: Everybody who had two nickels to rub together left D.C. White people moved out to the suburbs, and D.C. became mostly Black. So now it was in rubbles and shambles and had to be put back together, and that happened in many of the major cities.

Newkirk: The riots had come and gone. Like so many Black commentators had predicted, the dynamite of the ghettos had finally and fully exploded. For some folks like Stokely Carmichael, the fires of uprisings would lead to a Black phoenix of liberation. But when Frank looked out at the streets, all he saw was devastation. All he saw were ashes.

***

Newkirk: How did things wind down?

Robert Birt: The military. [Laughs.]

Newkirk: On April 11, exactly a week after King was killed, the Holy Week uprising in Baltimore was over. Over 100 cities total had gone up. In all, across the country, there were 43 recorded deaths, and over 20,000 arrests. One-fifth of those arrests had been in Baltimore. Maryland crushed the riots with overwhelming force, sending as many as 11,000 troops into the streets. Robert Birt watched the crackdown from the Latrobe housing projects in East Baltimore.

Birt: [Laughs.] Sooner or later, I mean, there is no such thing as battling the military with Molotov cocktails and bricks. It's not real. The National Guard and some parts of the Army came into the city, and gradually, they reestablished control of the city.

Newkirk: Before the city went up, Governor Agnew had been happy to play the moderate. He’d even invited civil-rights leaders to meet and discuss reforms that might finally start fixing Baltimore’s ghettos. By April 11, that version of Spiro Agnew was gone. He said there would be no sympathy for people who looted or burned.

But he still held to his word to host those Black leaders in Baltimore. That afternoon, around 100 Black activists, politicians, and community leaders gathered at the state office. They hoped that the meeting would be the beginning of real change for Black Baltimore. But then Spiro Agnew just started reading prepared remarks.

Spiro Agnew: Hard on the heels of tragedy come the assignment of blame and the excuses. I did not invite you here today for either purpose. I did not ask you here to recount previous deprivations nor to hear me enumerate prior attempts to correct them. I did not request your presence to bid for peace with the public dollar.

Newkirk: As it turns out, he wasn’t there to discuss anything—not solutions, not proposals for jobs or housing. Agnew praised the leaders present for being law-abiding citizens. But then his speech took a turn.

Agnew: Look around you. If you’ll observe, the ready-mix, instantaneous type of leader is not present. The circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting type of leader is not present. The caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type of leader is conspicuous by his absence. This is no accident, ladies and gentlemen. It’s just good planning. And in the vernacular of today, that’s what it’s all about, baby.

Newkirk: Agnew was on the offensive. He called out Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown as provocateurs who had incited Black neighborhoods to riot. By extension, he blamed all Black radicals for creating the conditions for a race war in America. He rejected the idea that racism or the killing of King had anything to do with it.

Agnew: Now parts of many of our cities lie in ruins. And you know who the fires burned out, just as you know who lit the fires. They were not lit in honor of your great fallen leader, nor were they lit from frustration and despair. These fires were kindled at the suggestion and with the instruction of the advocates of violence.

Newkirk: What’s worse, he didn’t just blame the radicals. The room was full of moderates—the kind of people who’d even supported Agnew politically. And he was blaming them.

Agnew: We cannot have a meaningful communication and dialogue to solve the problem if we continue to listen to the lunatic fringes on each end of the problem. Now, I’ve said this to you, and I threw down the gauntlet to you: I repudiate white racists. Do you repudiate Black racists? Are you willing, as I am willing, to repudiate the white racists? Are you willing to repudiate the Carmichaels on the ground? Answer me. Answer me. Do you repudiate Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael?

Leader: We don’t repudiate them as human beings.

Agnew: That’s what I was afraid of.

Leader: Wait a minute! Wait just a minute. I don't repudiate you as a person. I happen to be a Christian.

Newkirk: The speech blindsided the leaders. They were so angry that many of them walked out and held their own press conference, responding to Agnew, calling him out. But by then, not a lot of viewers or listeners would have tuned in, because around that same time, the signing ceremony for the Fair Housing Act was starting.

***

Journalist: Good afternoon. Signing of the civil-rights bill will be here in the East Room of the White House, a large room.

Levinson: Keep in mind, Vann, we went from April 4—the riots in Washington, the death of Martin Luther King, the meeting with the civil-rights leaders—to dealing with the American public, to dealing with the Senate, dealing with the House.

Journalist: A few months ago, few would have thought the 90th Congress would pass a bill so far reaching as to include a ban on discrimination in most of the nation’s housing.

Newkirk: Just after Spiro Agnew’s press conference, the time had finally come for President Johnson to sign the Fair Housing Act. It had been a hell of a week for the White House. Aides like Larry Levinson had spent so much time keeping tabs on riots and trying to get the bill through Congress. On the afternoon of April 11, they got to sit back and watch the show.

Levinson: Johnson sat down and looked around, had all his pens—piles and piles of signing pens. And around him were the leaders of the civil-rights movement: Thurgood Marshall; Clarence Mitchell Jr.; others in the NAACP; Senator Mondale; Senator Brooke; the House leader, McCormack; Emanuel Celler, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

Newkirk: Johnson was supposed to be the presidential lion in winter. He was old, sick, and tired, and he had given up the fight to younger, healthier men. But here in the East Room, he was LBJ again. He took time to look back on his legacy as the civil-rights president. He compared the moment to Reconstruction.

Lyndon B. Johnson: I shall never forget that it is more than 100 years ago when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. But it was a proclamation. It was not a fact. And in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we affirmed through law that men equal under God are also equal when they seek a job, when they go to get a meal in a restaurant, or when they seek lodging for the night in any state in the union.

Newkirk: He even urged Congress to do more, to take up the big spending bills that King had fought for. He denounced racism and rioting, and told Americans that unity was the only way forward through this national crisis.

Johnson: Of course, all America is outraged at the assassination of an outstanding Negro leader, who was at that meeting that afternoon in the White House in 1966. And America is also outraged at the looting and the burning that defiled our democracy. And we just must put our shoulders together and put a stop to both. The time is here. Action must be now.

Levinson: And as he was picking up his pen to sign the bill, he said, “And by the way, I want you to know, when I sign this bill, the chimes of liberty and the bell of liberty will ring a little bit louder.” And I heard that message, that statement, and I began to get sort of shivers up my spine. What a way to capture a moment.

Newkirk: This was the moment. For the White House, they’d finally gotten the trifecta passed. And they had done it in the middle of riots, in maybe the most hostile atmosphere for civil-rights legislation in a decade. Still, the bill wasn’t what Johnson had promised civil-rights leaders, or what the Kerner Commission recommended, and definitely not what more-radical Black leaders wanted. The ultimate question was the only one that nobody could really answer: What would King think?

Larry Levinson: I think there was always that, you know, dissonant chorus out there. But I think it was sort of a joinder at a point of mutual interest: the Martin Luther King movement with the aims and objectives of the LBJ administration.

Journalist: Do you happen to know whether Dr. King was asked before his death whether he was for or against this bill?

Hosea Williams: Certainly. We discussed it many times, and as far as Dr. King was concerned, as far as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is concerned, this bill is an aspirin for cancer into blood. It is nothing.

Newkirk: In a televised debate just after the bill was signed, King’s old friend and former SCLC lieutenant Hosea Williams came out and said that the Fair Housing Act was a mockery, an insult to King’s memory. He stressed that the only thing that could make things right was a real investment in Black America.

Williams: If you can find money to put a man on the moon, if you can find money to burn little brown babies in Vietnam with napalm bombs, why can’t you find money to put Black men on their feet in this nation?

Newkirk: But there would be no more money, no new major bills. This new housing bill was what we got, and it would take a while to kick in, to hopefully integrate neighborhoods and outlaw discrimination. Until then, the plan was to try and go back to normal. But for people who had just been through the most traumatic week of their lives, that was more than hard to do.

***

Newkirk: In Baltimore, Robert Birt went back to taking the bus to his mostly white high school. One day, his teacher, a white woman, tried her best to talk to the students about the cause of the rebellion.

Robert Birt: She was trying to explain what had happened, and especially cause she’s a white teacher, she was saying that there were, of course, problems and grievances and etcetera, and that they’ve not been attended to. And so she said she imagined that the assassination of Dr. King was sort of the last straw, and things boiled over.

Newkirk: It was a pretty good, liberal sort of explanation. Some of the kids agreed with her.

Birt: One guy said, “You know, I’ll tell you the truth. If I was colored, I’d probably riot too, because I’ve been keeping up with this, and this is pretty bad, you know.”

Newkirk: But some students didn’t buy it.

Birt: And some person started saying things like, “Well, this is criminal activity,” you know? And at that point, I said, “What’s criminal—” And I was 15. I said, “What’s criminal is you and your society.”

Newkirk: Robert hadn’t been in trouble in school before. Maybe before the riots, before the assassination, he would’ve let something like this go. But that week, something in Robert Birt had changed.

Birt: The more they talked, the angrier I got, and I said, “I’m not going to tell you about everything you did. The last thing you did is you murdered Martin Luther King.”

Newkirk: In D.C., for Vanessa Lawson and her family, each passing day increased their anxiety and despair. There was still no sign of her brother Vincent. Her dad even hired a white private investigator to go search. They figured he might have better luck than Black people could in getting through all the curfews and checkpoints, but he hadn’t found anything yet.

Vanessa Lawson: I remember this guy assuring him, my dad. It just shook him, because within a couple of days, they were starting to board up buildings.

Newkirk: When the curfew finally lifted, the family decided to get out there and start looking themselves.

Lawson: When the National Guard finally start letting people come around, when they were boarding up buildings, my grandmother—everybody—just started walking and walking the whole neighborhood. You couldn’t even get down in that area. And my brother, my dad—I remember them going and just walking and walking.

Newkirk: Their only lead was the last call that Vincent had made to his mother, when he was so proud of grabbing her some stockings from a store. And then, the friends he was with told the investigator where they had gone last.

Lawson: They told him where they went. They were a group. They ran to this store. They ran to that store. And the last store that they ran out of, because the police was chasing them, was Morton’s.

Newkirk: It was Morton’s. The same department store they used to visit with their mother. It was a start. Someplace to look, even if it was just for a body, at that point.

Lawson: And what hurts me the most is the detective told my dad that they checked all these buildings before they started boarding them up.

Newkirk: The investigator told them that Mayor Washington had sent people in to look at all the boarded-up buildings. He said they didn’t find Vincent in Morton’s, or any evidence he had been there.

Lawson: They said they checked these buildings, and they haven’t found anything. Let’s just hope he’s okay, and he’s still just walking around. This guy says, “You know, maybe he’s just got hit in the head. Maybe he’s having a memory loss, and maybe, you know, he’s just drifted off somewhere.”

Newkirk: It was the thought that kept the family going, the hope against hope—this idea that Vincent might just be walking around the streets with no memory, no recollection of who he was or where he came from, that one day they might bump into him and things might go back to normal. But that kind of hope also kept them from moving on. It kept them stuck in the middle of the riots, looking out the window, waiting for Vincent to come home. And they waited for a long time.

In 1966, Spiro T. Agnew is elected governor

Agnew, campaigning as a moderate Republican, is elected governor of Maryland, defeating George P. Mahoney, a segregationist. In his campaign, Agnew championed antidiscrimination policies.

King’s funeral takes place in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 9, 1968

President Johnson does not attend.

The Fair Housing Act is passed

The FHA passes the House of Representatives on April 11, 1968, with a vote of 250–172, after being stalled in the legislature since 1966.

Governor Agnew blames civil-rights leaders

Agnew holds a press conference on April 11, 1968, a week after King was assassinated. He invites notable civil-rights leaders and then blames them for the violence in Baltimore.

Holy Week: Overcome

2023-03-14T06:00:00-04:00

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Juandalynn Abernathy: Yolanda and I were on the telephone talking, as we did every day—every day after school. We were extremely close.

And at that time, we had the Princesses telephone. You know what that little Princess telephone looked like? It’s this oval, half oval. And she had the pink color and I had a pink color.

Vann R. Newkirk II: Juandalynn Abernathy was at home in Atlanta, on her private phone line with her best friend, Yolanda—Yolanda King, who she called Yoki. Then another phone line at the house rang.

Abernathy: And then I said, “Yoki, wait just a moment. The telephone is ringing. Let me pick it up.” And in picking up the phone was a friend of mine, and she said, “I’ve been trying to get you on your line.” And I said, “I know. I’m on the phone with Yoki.” And she says, “You have to turn on the television. Dr. King has been shot.”

Newkirk: Juandalynn was 13. To her, “Dr. King” wasn’t just a famous person on the TV. He was “Uncle Martin.” Her daddy was Ralph David Abernathy, King’s closest associate and his best friend. The two families had been joined together by the movement. They went on vacations together. And King’s daughter, her best friend, was waiting on the other line.

Abernathy: I hung up the phone, turned on the television up front, and ran back to the bedroom. And I told Yoki. And she hung up the phone; I hung up the phone. And then all of a sudden, the doorbell starts to ring. And I run up front, and the house starts filling up with people, and my mother is walking out of the bedroom.

Newkirk: Juandalynn’s mother had already gotten the news.

Abernathy: She was on the phone with Aunt Coretta.

Newkirk: Like all the partners and spouses in the movement, she had a bag packed and plans in place to move at a moment’s notice, in case of something urgent: A bomb threat. A disaster. An assassination.

Abernathy: It wasn’t 10 minutes, and we were gone. Just like that [snaps].

Newkirk: Friends came to take the family to the airport, to get to Memphis.

Abernathy: And I just remember thinking, Oh. I’m praying. Oh, he’ll be all right. He’ll be all right. Just praying.

Newkirk: This was something they’d known might happen, something they’d trained for.

Abernathy: We were no fools, you see. So we were praying, of course, that Uncle Martin would make it, and just hoping and thinking, It’s not bad. It’s not bad. He’ll be all right.

Newkirk: King had almost died once before, when a woman stabbed him in the chest with a letter opener in 1958. Still, experiencing this was another thing.

Abernathy: And then we’re jumping out of the car, and Mother has met Aunt Coretta, and they’re on the way to the gate. And I see the mayor, Ivan Allen, walking toward them. And I hear him say to Coretta, he’s very sorry to have to say to her, um … that Uncle Martin had died.

Newkirk: Coretta Scott King would fly the next day to Memphis, to claim her husband’s body. She and Ralph David Abernathy had to plan a funeral befitting a man who meant so much to so many, and who had been killed for that meaning. They would all have to begin to learn to make grief a companion, and figure out how to go on without a husband, father, brother, uncle, and friend.

On the ground in Memphis, how to mourn King as a person was only one consideration of many. Movement leaders and the Black workers they’d come to aid had to figure out how to keep King’s work alive. But in order to do that, they had to confront a country that had grown suspicious of him and of the movement. They had to learn how to march without their drum major. A crisis of faith was coming. And there were no easy answers.

Abernathy: It was like our world fell apart, because Uncle Martin was like the center. Everything centered around Uncle Martin.

***

Newkirk: Part 4: “Overcome.”

***

Newkirk: The old Lorraine Motel in Memphis is now the National Civil Rights Museum. Walking through the front door, you see and hear an entire history of the movement, from slavery to emancipation, through the killing of Emmett Till, to the sit-ins and boycotts. A walk through the history of Blackness leads you to room 306, the only area that still looks like it did in 1968. The last bedroom where Martin Luther King slept is now enclosed in glass. Music and the sound from a video exhibit usually bleeds into the hallway and bounces off the glass walls. But when museum staff turned the sound off for us, the space became contemplative. Still.

We visit with John Burl Smith. He stops and comments on the photos we pass. He’s got on a brown Kangol beret. It’s somewhere between New Jack City and Nick Fury.

John Burl Smith: Room 306 is just down the walk, about four or five rooms from where we were.

Newkirk: He can’t find his own face in the exhibits, and he feels a certain way about it. But he was a part of this story. A part of the story of this room.

Burl Smith: And we came down and knocked on the door. Dr. King came to the door and he invited us in. And I was surprised that it was only him, because the hotel was full of SCLC people. But he was in a room by himself. We came into the room and we talked.

Newkirk: Room 306 feels like a liminal space between what is and what might have been. Between the present that we have and the future that people in the movement dared to envision. It’s easy to get caught up here, thinking about what happens if there is peace in Vietnam in ’68, or what happens if King does not get shot, if he lives to be an old man.

Many of the histories of the movement say that it ended here, with a single gunshot, in 1968. But that reading of history always struggles to explain the reason King was here in the first place. In fact, the movement was already at a crossroads—maybe a turning point, maybe a breaking point—before he traveled to Memphis at all. King was no longer in favor with the public, or with the president. People were wondering if his philosophy of nonviolence was useful anymore. Lots of younger Black folks were tuning King out, even saying he was the problem.

Burl Smith: I basically saw him as an appeaser, so to speak.

Newkirk: John was born to a sharecropping family in Mississippi, but they moved to Memphis when he was young. Growing up, he wasn’t a “rock the boat” kind of kid.

Burl Smith: Well, I’ll put it like I was raised to be a good colored boy.

Newkirk: It’s interesting to see John now and try to think about him as a kid. Right now the guy is a walking radical-Black-history encyclopedia. He’s like the platonic ideal of the conscious older brother. He wrote 1,000-page book telling the history from slavery to hip-hop. But back in the day? His mother did a little community work. They knew the NAACP, but they weren’t activists. John wanted to grow up and have that middle-class, white-picket-fence life. He liked the bravado of John Wayne in his movies. So during the Vietnam War, he decided to join the Air Force.

Burl Smith: I had honored the nation by serving. I felt that I was due the blessings of America in terms of a good job and those kind of things.

Newkirk: He shipped out in ’64—after the “I Have a Dream Speech” but before the Selma to Montgomery march. The Civil Rights Act passed that year and everything seemed on the way up. The Voting Rights Act passed the next year. But then, the energy started to shift.

Reporter: It began with police and rioters clashing on a hot Wednesday night. Some believe it could have been stopped right then.

Police dispatch: Calling in looters at 52 and Broadway. All units …

Newkirk: In ’65, not too long after Selma and the Voting Rights Act, the ghetto in Watts, California, rose in rebellion.

Crowd: Kill the white man!

Reporter: Then came summer, 1966, and as riots crackled through his cities, the Northern white man came to realize the depth of his confusion, his animosity, and fear. Black Power was the catalyst, a phrase shouted by a 25-year-old revolutionary on a Mississippi highway. It was a rallying cry to Northern Blacks, mired in frustration and bitterness, a cry that sounded like a threat of violence, of vengeance, to a white man fed up with racial turmoil.

Newkirk: Major riots took place over the following four summers in cities across America. SNCC and other organizations pushed away from King’s orbit. Leaders like Stokely Carmichael with his message of Black Power questioned if nonviolence could even still work.

Burl Smith: Stokely uttered the first statements about Black Power, but civil-rights leaders had closed the door on that. They really didn’t want anything to do with Black Power. And I, following their line, felt the same way: that Black Power really was something that was going to destroy the Black community.

Newkirk: King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference knew that Black Power was tapping into something real, especially in the North. They decided to shift their organizing up to Chicago, to protest housing segregation and prove that they had relevance beyond old Jim Crow. But Chicago didn’t go as they planned.

[Racist shouting: “I live here. Get back. I live here! Those fucking (N-word) don’t live here; I live here.”]

Newkirk: White folks showed up by the busload to protest against him. Some waved signs with swastikas. During one march in a white neighborhood in 1966, a counter protester hit King in the head with a rock.

Eventually, King and the SCLC did force some housing reforms in the city. But it didn’t feel like the same kind of glory that people were used to.

Reporter: King’s people acknowledged that they needed a victory if there were not to be defections from their forces. That victory finally came when Dr. King threatened to march on the suburban town of Cicero. Chicago civic leaders feared violence there. So at a hastily assembled summit meeting, they agreed to some concessions and King called off his march. Through it all, though, he had insisted that no matter what the competition from his more-militant Black brothers, he would never renounce his policy of nonviolence.

Newkirk: King was being challenged and changed. Around the same time, so was John Burl Smith. He came back from Vietnam in ’66 and got a job. He was working his way toward that white-picket-fence life. But his old childhood friend, Charles Cabbage, had just come back from Morehouse College in Atlanta. And he had been radicalized.

Burl Smith: Well, Charles, when he comes home, I don’t recognize him because he’s got this—he’s wearing sandals and Levi’s, and he’s got a dashiki on and a big, huge afro and a beard. He’s wearing shades.

Newkirk: Charles had bought into Black Power. He was already affiliated with SNCC and trying his best to bring Stokely Carmichael’s philosophies and tactics to Memphis. And he wanted John’s help.

Burl Smith: So for about three weeks, we are debating the political atmosphere in the Black community. And of course, I’m on the side of defending America. I believe the Bill of Rights and the Constitution applied to me. And Charles is on the other side, chopping all that up as it come out of my mouth. I knew he was not someone that was pumped up with a lot of, you know, “bull” about being Black. And so Charles was like my model as to what Black Power advocates do.

Newkirk: John decided to start taking his own trips to Atlanta. SNCC had an organizing and training program around Black colleges there. Prospective Black radicals came there to read Black socialists and anarchists, and to learn how to debate other people’s beliefs.

Burl Smith: And this kind of developed into what they started to call Black Power sleepovers. So it was kind of like a party, but it was really serious because we were really the people who had done the reading.

Newkirk: Around the same time, Charles was making good on his promise to build something in Memphis. He and a friend, Coby Smith, were starting a homegrown organization, similar to the Black Panthers out West. They began by calling it the Black Organizing Project. John was a founding member.

Burl Smith: Charles brought Black Power to Memphis.

Newkirk: And how did that feel to be the guys?

Burl Smith: It felt strange to me, but good.

Newkirk: The group spread their message to Black youth in the colleges and universities around Memphis. They brought in their friends and cousins. There were younger kids in the city too, who were restless—neighborhood clubs and gangs. Charles and John wanted to connect with them and channel their energy into organizing.

Burl Smith: They had a little neighborhood club and the leader of the group was an artist whose name was Donny Delaney. Donny had taken a Levi’s jacket and cut the sleeves off and decorated the back, and the name of their group was called the Invaders. At that time, there was this TV show called The Invaders.

Newkirk: The premise of the show was that aliens had come to the Earth and wanted to make it their world.

Burl Smith: So I identified with that metaphor, and I put the letters on the back of my Army jacket. And this is basically the beginning of the Invaders.

Newkirk: By late 1967, John was about as far away from the white-picket-fence life as you can get. He had an Afro. He was walking around Memphis with a military jacket with invaders on the back. He was speaking out openly against capitalism and imperialism and the Vietnam War. And he was definitely not with all that nonviolent stuff.

Burl Smith: Civil-rights leaders were busy attacking Black Power advocates for destroying the community and even being Communists. Yeah, any kind of charge that would denigrate Black Power in the eyes of the general public.

Newkirk: The group called themselves the Invaders. They didn’t think much of Dr. King. But even they noticed that something was changing about him. Around the same time John made his radical turn, King started speaking out forcefully against the war in Vietnam. He tied the struggle against white supremacy to the larger struggle against imperialism.

In doing so, he knowingly offended Lyndon B. Johnson, white liberal supporters, and other members of that civil-rights middle-class leadership. The NAACP openly criticized King. But it all got John to listening.

Burl Smith: When you look at how America was treating us in terms of the denial of the basic rights of human beings, then a person like Dr. King can’t do anything but come out against the war, because it was an anathema for him. There was no way you could make a deal with the devil.

Newkirk: Even with his new stance on Vietnam, the Black papers were reporting that King was losing ground and authority to more militant, younger Black groups. The SCLC was under pressure on all sides. So they decided to try something new. Something bigger.

Reporter 1: The most massive series of demonstrations ever attempted is the promise of Dr. Martin Luther King, leader of a planned April civil-disobedience drive in Washington. Dr. King …

Reporter 2: … A coalition of 75 Washington Negro groups has voiced support for Dr. Martin Luther King’s April demonstrations here …

Newkirk: In 1967, King announced the new Poor People’s Campaign. The idea was to bring thousands of people from Black neighborhoods to march on D.C. They would push for legislation for jobs, housing, and wages. King sent the SCLC’s biggest names around the country to try and spread the word, and held massive planning meetings in Atlanta. Ralph David Abernathy worked to harness the energy of the heyday of the movement.

Ralph David Abernathy: Are you with this Poor People’s Campaign? If so, raise your hand. All right, get that written down. [Laughter.] With the movement and with this Poor People’s Campaign. Now I’ve got to run, got to preach a sermon. [Laughter.] But I did want to get that on the record [Laughter] before I left. Now who is the next speaker?

Newkirk: The Poor People’s Campaign was going to be big—it would make the 1963 March on Washington look like a picnic. King didn’t have allies left to offend anymore, so he began planning something more confrontational, something more like a nonviolent siege.

But the SCLC wasn’t raising a lot of money. They were downright broke in early 1968. National media and public opinion were not catching the spirit Abernathy expressed. They were not rallying behind King the way they had in Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham. There was a real chance that the campaign King planned might not even get off the ground, let alone help eliminate poverty in America. But early that year, he got word about the Black sanitation workers who were striking in Memphis. And the Invaders were helping organize them.

Burl Smith: And the sanitation strike is the real event that brought everything together.

Labor leader: The lowest-paid man in our society should not have to strike to get a decent wage a century after emancipation and after the enactment of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendment.

Taylor Rogers: It was awful every day. We had these tubs we had to put the garbage in. Most of the tubs had holes in them, and garbage would leak all over you.

Elmore Nickelberry: I had maggots in my shirts. Maggots go down into my shoes. And we worked in the rain—snow, ice, and rain. We had to. If we didn’t, we’d lose our jobs.

Speaker at rally: … because these men tell us that all their lives they’ve been wanting to be men. All their lives they’ve been struggling to be dignified. [Applause.] And they tell us that this may be their only chance and they’re not giving up! [Cheering and applause.]

Newkirk: The situation in Memphis had begun in February ’68, after two Black men, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death in the back of a garbage truck during a rainstorm. Black sanitation workers were already fed up. They weren’t allowed to use facilities that white workers could, or ride in the cabs of the garbage trucks. They couldn’t even protect themselves from the rain without risking their lives … So they planned to strike.

When Mayor Henry Loeb got word of the strike, he denounced it.

Henry Loeb: As mayor, I represent the whole city. First, I represent these men and have been available and will be available to discuss our problems. Second, and most important, I represent the public, whose health is endangered. And this cannot and will not be tolerated.

Newkirk: The sanitation workers decided to defy the mayor and strike for better wages and working conditions. They chose to organize at Clayborn Temple, an old church that was one of the centers of Black community life in Memphis.

***

Newkirk: Clayborn Temple is under construction now. The old, stained-glass windows that would have bathed people in multicolored light are boarded up. One of the walls collapsed. The giant organ pipes, in the back, are still there but tarnished. But now the church is being restored by a group of people inspired by the sanitation workers’ strike.

John Burl Smith and I are both given hard hats as we look around. He gave me a sense of just how packed the place must have been during the strike.

Burl Smith: That was the podium area where the preacher sat. And then there was a choir stand behind that. They had three pulpits—a large one and two little small ones. There was two aisles, and pews on the outer edge, and the way it was designed, as they went back, they got larger.

Newkirk: John says that he was drawn to the meetings at Clayborn because he’d been raised to care about his people.

Burl Smith: They had children, you know—families. And at a dollar and 75 cents, eight-hour, ten-hour days, I mean, you’re barely paying rent and buying food.

Newkirk: But he also says that at first the meetings at Clayborn mostly featured civil-rights leaders talking down at the workers—that the workers themselves weren’t given a voice. They looked dejected. Even talking about it now seemed to get to him.

Newkirk: Now, I notice this is something you get animated about.

Burl Smith: Yes, I get very animated about it because they were like my father. You know. I could look in their faces and in their eyes, and I knew what was going on in their life.

Newkirk: Lots of the younger Invaders, the members of the group he led, were children of the sanitation workers.

Burl Smith: So it became personal to me the more I came down and the more I became involved in it, because I saw the helpless position they were in.

Newkirk: One night, a preacher who knew John and knew he wanted to say something invited him up to say a word before the prayer.

Burl Smith: Standing there looking out; they were so quiet and calm, you know, and subdued like they had been beat down, you know. And I wanted to make them feel like the fight had just begun. You have power.

Newkirk: There were community organizers in the crowd, including Maxine Smith, the leader of the local NAACP. John wanted to shock them, so he dialed up the rhetoric.

Burl Smith: When I get to the end, I mentioned the fact that they may have to pick up some guns and fight because this is your life and this is your livelihood.

Newkirk: When you said, “You need to get guns,” do they cheer you? Did anybody here boo you?

Burl Smith: No. Nobody booed me.

Newkirk: What did they do?

Burl Smith: Maxine Smith jumped up and ended the speech, because, “We’re not for that. We’re not for violence. We don’t want violence. Don’t listen to him.” And you know what? I didn’t care, because they had heard it.

Newkirk: They cut him off, got to the prayer. But John’s proud of that speech. For him and the Invaders, it crystallized their approach. They thought the civil-rights leaders in the city wanted to get the strikers to go back to work, to give up all their leverage.

The Invaders pushed more and more in a radical direction. John says he had the idea to use counterterrorism tactics he’d learned fighting the Viet Cong. They coached kids on how to draw the city’s attention away from the workers. They set trash fires and built barricades, and harassed the scabs who came to pick up trash.

Burl Smith: You could throw bricks at them. You could throw bottles at them. You know, you could do anything you could to make it hard on them.

Newkirk: At the start, the SCLC didn’t pay much attention to Memphis. It was a local labor conflict. But King’s associate James Lawson was chairman of the local civil-rights coalition supporting the workers. Lawson invited King to speak. After police beat strikers during one of the nearly daily marches, King finally agreed to come down. John was one of the thousands of people who crammed into another church, the Mason Temple, when King spoke.

Burl Smith: And when Dr. King got there, they had to almost carry him to the podium to get through the people.

(Group singing, then male soloist: “We shall overcome … Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome someday.”)

Newkirk: A lot of people thought King would just come down and give a speech and go. The Invaders even thought he might come down to break the strike, and encourage the strikers to go back to work. But then King started talking about power. He said that “power is the ability to achieve purpose; power is the ability to affect change.” It wasn’t too far from what Stokely Carmichael was saying, what the Black Panthers were saying out in Oakland. That all impressed John and his comrades a little. And then came the bombshell.

Burl Smith: And when they quieted down, and he said anybody that’s got a job shouldn’t go to work that day and children shouldn’t attend school.

And then he told them, “If you want me to, I’ll lead the march to the mayor’s office.” And of course, [Imitates crowd roar] everybody went wild.

Newkirk: It was stunning, maybe one of the most unexpected moments of King’s life. In 13 years of activism, he’d never called for or been part of a general strike. Now here he was, proposing to come back and lead it himself, talking about power. John was sold.

Burl Smith: We had proposed some radical stuff. But never, you know—we never even thought that a general strike would be something to think about, let alone do. I thought it was great. That’s when I really knew he was on the side of the workers rather than on the side of the power structure.

Newkirk: In that crowd, King saw the face of the issues he was trying to deal with. Here were poor Black workers, struggling not for the right to send their kids to white schools or the right to vote, but for a piece of the pie. It made the Poor People’s Campaign real, gave it shape and direction, in a time when the SCLC didn’t really have a plan. King decided that he would come back. He said, “The movement lives or dies in Memphis.”

***

Newkirk: Ten days later, Martin Luther King came back to Memphis to lead the march. They started here at Clayborn Temple.

Burl Smith: You know, I’d never seen that many Black people in one place. The March on Washington was different, you know—white people, Black people, you know. But this was Black people.

Newkirk: Some of the Invaders wanted to disrupt the march, to show it was a sham. But John just wanted to witness it.

Burl Smith: We took up positions right there at the door. On either side were the pillars are. And when the march started to move, you know, it was like being on the reviewing stand because people were waving and giving the Black Power signal and all of that as they marched down the street.

Reporter: Several thousand Negro demonstrators are participating in this largest civil-rights demonstration ever in Memphis, Tennessee. Many of the demonstrators are carrying the sign i am a man. They stretch out for several blocks. Police are on hand with about 600 officers. Almost the entire force is standing by here.

Newkirk: The march was huge. It was exactly the kind of action that Black folks in Memphis wanted King to help the strikers do.

Paul Barnett (journalist): Hundreds of people have joined. There must be 5,000 at this time or more.

Newkirk: But as the march advanced some of the younger folks walking alongside it began breaking windows.

Barnett: There go some windows. Right here, right here on Beale between Second and Third. There go the windows. We don’t know whether you can hear the tinkling of the glass or not. The first violence we have seen.

Newkirk: The whole thing started to break down. And when police came out and met the marchers with force, King’s triumph turned into a full-on riot.

Ray Sherman (journalist): Police rushing to the scene—almost struck a pedestrian. They’re moving in with riot guns and tear gas canisters. Negro youths are smashing windows.

Barnett: Dr. Martin Luther King, who was supposed to lead the march—no one has any idea where he is…

Newkirk: King’s advisers were terrified that he might be hurt or killed. So they put him in a car and drove him away.

Sherman: That sound you just heard was the sound of tear gas fired by…

(Crowd in background: “Go, go, go go.”)

Barnett: Complete disorder on Beale Street … as we mentioned the breaking of windows here on Beale …

Sherman: Police have formed a cordon across Main Street at this time in an attempt to at least calm the demonstration, which has gotten completely out of hand.

The Negro youths are shouting at this time, “Go, go, go!”

Newkirk: Police started attacking and chasing Black people on the streets. One of the officers saw Larry Payne, an 16-year-old Black kid, exiting the Sears department store. With no evidence of a crime, he chased the boy to his mother’s apartment nearby. The officer waited for Payne to leave the housing complex and shot him in the stomach with his shotgun, killing him. The police said that Payne was holding a knife, although eyewitnesses say he was unarmed and holding his hands up. The officer was never prosecuted.

***

Newkirk: Larry Payne was the only recorded fatality of the day. But the Memphis police brutalized the sanitation workers and their families. Some people tried to defend themselves with the same poles that carried the i am a man signs. But they were surrounded by the police.

Burl Smith: They attacked the march. And so you didn’t really have a chance to think about anything other than defending yourself. This was not just Invaders but Black men in general. There were women and children and old folks in the march. They were running for their lives. And they pushed us all the way back to Clayborn Temple, where the march started. And we were there with our backs to Clayborn Temple, and the women and children and old folks went inside the church. And they shot tear gas in the church.

Newkirk: They shot tear gas into the church?

Burl Smith: They shot tear gas into the church—went inside the church and beat up the people that were in there.

Newkirk: The organizers of the march took King back to his hotel. He crawled under the covers. He knew that this was all bad. He knew that the news would say he led a riot. When the headlines started to roll in, that’s exactly what they said. The FBI had sent direct memos to newsrooms discrediting King. They used claims they’d gotten from a crew of informants that infiltrated every single Black organization in Memphis. Even some Black publications and leaders criticized King for calling for the strike and increasing tensions in the city. City leaders used the riot to take a hard line against further protests. Mayor Loeb promised crackdowns on any future unrest.

Henry Loeb: The police, with my full sanction, took the necessary action to restore law, and order and to protect the lives and property of the citizens of Memphis.

Newkirk: The Memphis march was supposed to be King’s second wind. It was supposed to be proof that the Poor People’s Campaign would work. The SCLC was furious at the Invaders. They blamed them for instigating young people into breaking windows and setting fires. In a press conference the next morning, King basically said as much. And Coby Smith, of the Invaders, didn’t exactly dispute it.

Reporter: Have you or your group organized last night’s burnings?

Coby Smith: We don’t organize burnings; essentially, we organize people. If people burn, they burn.

Newkirk: King’s colleagues at the SCLC wanted him to denounce the Invaders. The press asked him to denounce all Black radicals in the country, including SNCC’s Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, for instigating riots. But he refused. He said that their rage was a symptom, a product of white supremacy. He reached out.

Burl Smith: And Charles and Calvin and a couple other guys met with Dr. King. And that was the first meeting between the Invaders and Dr. King.

Newkirk: It was March 29. The Invaders were still skeptical of King. But that invitation to meet was the beginning of a sort of mutual respect. King understood their frustration and goals, and saw the value in keeping them closer to him … so he could keep an eye on them. For their part, the Invaders would never formally commit to nonviolence. But they believed King was walking the talk. They decided to consider working with him and planned to talk again, when he was back in town the next week, on the afternoon of April 4 at the Lorraine Motel.

Burl Smith: Charles and I walked down to his room, walked down to Dr. King’s room for that last meeting.

Newkirk: John says they talked about the Invaders becoming marshals in the next march, about how the Invaders wanted King to help fund some of their community programs, even though they didn’t really know the SCLC was broke.

Burl Smith: He reached over and put his hand on my knee. And during that instance and exchange, I don’t know but I just got the feeling that he was genuine—that he was serious and really dedicated to what he was trying to do for the poor people of America.

Newkirk: They talked about how Memphis had changed the Poor People’s Campaign, about how the strikers embodied the problems King wanted to address, and how winning for the workers was now a strategic goal for the SCLC. They talked about what was next. John left the Lorraine and drove back to his apartment. He was convinced that there had been a breakthrough. But he says law enforcement had used his meeting to make their move.

Burl Smith: So I get to the apartment, I open the door, I walk in, and the place is torn apart because they’ve raided. The TV is on the floor, and so by the time I got it set up and plugged in and turned it on, Walter Cronkite is the first face I see.

Walter Cronkite: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., civil-rights leader and Nobel Prize winner, was shot and killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

Burl Smith: And he’s telling us that Dr. King had just been shot. That’s how I find out.

Newkirk: Wow. How did that feel?

Burl Smith: Oh, man. That was like the bottom dropping out.

***

Bill Plant (journalist): Just to date this morning, Dr. Martin Luther King’s body was brought to lie in state for an hour. They were old; they were dressed for work; they were middle-aged with families—young, curious children. But they were almost all Black. For some, the experience was just too much. [Crying in background.]

Newkirk: Just hours after the shooting, a funeral home in Memphis prepared King’s body for public viewing, and then to be carried home to Atlanta. It immediately became a site of pilgrimage for Black Memphians. The rioting the previous night had been muted compared to other cities’, and even compared to the peak of the sanitation workers’ march just the week before. Maybe it was because King’s colleagues were still in the city, asking people to be peaceful. But it also felt as if everyone was just too occupied with King, with how to make the dream live on. The movement lived or died in Memphis.

After an all-night meeting with the SCLC, Ralph David Abernathy held a press conference outside of room 306. He looked and sounded tired. Exhausted. But he spoke deliberately. He used the preaching cadence that so many people associated with the movement, with King.

Ralph David Abernathy: The assassination of my dearest friend and closest associate, Martin Luther King Jr., has placed upon my shoulders the awesome task of directing the organization which he established.

Newkirk: It was like he was trying to still inspire people. Maybe even himself.

Abernathy: I tremble as I move forward to accept this responsibility. No man can fill Dr. King’s shoes.

Newkirk: Abernathy announced that the SCLC would continue the march that King had planned in support of the sanitation workers. He promised to keep the Poor People’s Campaign, and carry out the march to Washington. But he recognized that the political situation had changed. Riots burned in dozens of cities already, with no sign of stopping. Stokely Carmichael was going live right around this same time calling for the Black revolution. The window for nonviolence as a dominant, national organizing strategy was closing fast.

Reporter: Dr. Abernathy, what does the death of Dr. King mean to the policy of nonviolence?

Abernathy: Well, it only means that those of us who are dedicated to nonviolence will have to intensify our efforts and work with all of our power to seek to save this society. That is, if it can be saved, because, as Martin Luther King said over and over again, violence is not only immoral, but it is impractical.

Newkirk: He sounds less confident, more unsure about nonviolence as a philosophy than he or King had been before. He offered a fallback defense instead: that the violence of rioting or race war would only invite police and military crackdowns that would destroy Black communities.

As he spoke, those fears were already coming to pass. Mayors and governors across the country were asking for federal assistance in crushing rebellions and riots.

Journalist: The violence was by no means limited to Washington. Detroit tonight is under a curfew, and National Guard troops are on duty there. Guardsmen also have been mobilized in Chicago, where five blocks of predominantly Negro West Madison Avenue were reported afire, where looting broke out in the downtown Loop area, and in Boston, where a menacing crowd of young Negroes kept customers trapped in a supermarket for a time.

Newkirk: Politicians and pundits were already seizing on the riots, calling for law and order and worse. And in Memphis, among the activists and the remnants of the movement, grief and shock over the nationwide riots were widening rifts that had already been opened by years of stress and government infiltration. John Burl Smith was afraid the FBI or the police might finally make their move on him.

Burl Smith: “It was numbness” is about the best description I could give it because there weren’t any words, other than they were probably coming at us next.

***

Newkirk: Memphis was named after hallowed ground. Its ancient namesake was a capital of the Old Kingdom of Egypt. In the necropolis, at its center, there was a complex of pyramids and tombs where the kings of Egypt underwent their transformation from mortals to divine beings under the watch of the god of the underworld, Osiris. This significance might have originated in the placement of the capital on the Nile River, which itself is also tied to the old notions of rebirth and eternity. Thousands of miles and thousands of years away, settlers saw the bluff on the Mississippi River and thought there was something fitting about the name. In 1968, that city also became hallowed—a place where the life of a man was transformed into something beyond himself.

Douglas Edwards (journalist): The Reverend Abernathy, successor to Martin Luther King at the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the crowds shuffling past King’s coffin.

Abernathy: We have pledged to you that we are going to carry his work forward. Now, let us not do anything at this particular time that will discredit his life. He lived so nobly.

Tony Brunton (journalist): National Guardsmen, fixed bayonets, behind them helmeted city policemen with shotguns, submachine guns, and rifles, pushing the crowd back [Crowd singing], from time to time [Crowd singing: “Black and white together.”] asking them to move back for their own protection, the police said. Now they have moved back at the request of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the man who will be taking over for Dr. King, the leader of the Southern Christian conference. He asked them to move back.

(Crowd singing: “We shall overcome some day.”)

The Black Power group called the Invaders is created

The Black Organizing Project is founded in Memphis in 1967. Soon, some members begin calling themselves the Invaders.

Sanitation workers strike in Memphis

Two months before King’s assassination, sanitation workers in Memphis begin to strike. King later promises to join a protest march through the city for the workers.

King joins sanitation workers’ march

One week before King’s assassination, he travels to Memphis to lead the sanitation workers’ march, which is marred by bursts of violence. Memphis police kill 16-year-old Larry Payne.