Martin Luther King Assassination Riots

I've often been intrigued by what we might term to be defining moments. It's those moments in our lives where there is a clear and marked change. It is those moments where things take a sharp turn for better or for worse. It is a moment that changes absolutely everything after it happens. It could be graduating or deciding to drop out of school. Don't take that option. But I'm just saying that would be a defining moment. It could be the birth of a child. It could be the tragic death of a loved one.

It could be a marriage. It could be moving away across the world or across the nation. All of these things that fundamentally shift the direction of your life. But what about those moments that fundamentally shift the direction of a whole nation? Maybe it's the dropping of an atomic bomb or a Great Depression or a world war or a bloody revolution. Or maybe it's the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It is these defining moments in history that culminate into some type of collective response usually falling into the category of either collaborative mourning or a communal outrage or maybe a little bit of both.

So today we are going to talk about how one catastrophic moment in history, the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, and the riots that gripped the nation can serve as a case study for riots, protests and civil unrest. Now I probably don't have to give you the whole backstory but you know that America has existed as a racial hierarchy with Black people on the very bottom of the ladder since our great nation has been founded. So much progress has been made since those brutal days of Black enslavement, but Black people were still suffering indignities to their humanity on all fronts when Martin Luther King, Jr. was born in 1929. So he took the torch of Black freedom and carried that light onward as a great act of this orator and reformer through the 1950's and 60's. He took the torch from those like Phyllis Wheatley, from those like Frederick Douglass, from those like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and those other Black freedom fighters who came before him. There's plenty of information on his life but tragically I'm going to be talking about his death. So we get to Wednesday, April 3rd in 1968. It's 11:00 a.m. and there is a 39 year old King and he arrives at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis from his home in Atlanta.

Five years earlier, in 1963, he had given what some believe is the greatest speech of all time. His electrifying "I Have A Dream" speech had rocketed him into the role of the spiritual and political leader of Black America. The yearnings, the hopes, and the dreams of millions of Black people struggling for equality lay square on his shoulders. So Dr. King checked into the motel and settled into his $13-a-night twin bedroom. And he was sharing this room with activist Ralph Abernathy.

Room number 306 on the first floor overlooking the courtyard. King had decided that he was not going to stay in some chic hotel. He was a Nobel Peace prize winner and all the accoutrements and the money that came along with that. He was someone who had gained national attention but we're told that King wanted to get back to his roots. He wanted to get back down on the ground with the people. So he decided to stay at a motel. He was there in Memphis to strike with the sanitation workers for economic equality.

That night he was due to speak at a nearby church. It is here at the pulpit of the Mason Temple Church that he would preach the last sermon he would ever preach. We're told that some shutters banged in the wind and it made King visibly nervous. Ever since the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 he has felt unprotected, unguarded, and undefended. If the President of the United States was vulnerable enough to be murdered, and this was a man being guarded by the highly skilled and vigilant secret service agents, then King must have been thinking he wouldn't stand a chance with the national acclaim and disdain that he was facing from much of white America.

Death threats, his house had been bombed, he'd been stabbed before. This is a man who had already had attempts on his life. King was hated and feared in his own time, even though he is loved today. The only dream some racists had was the one where King was dead. So King was at the Temple preaching. He had been speaking energetically for 40 minutes without notes. His voice crescendoed and reverberated around the room. I'll make a very feeble attempt to quote one of King's speeches. But I highly suggest you go listen to it yourself because I could not do it justice.

But King says, "I have seen the promised land! I may not get there with you but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So I am happy tonight! I am not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!" And the congregation roars its approval. It's very ominous too because within this speech he kind of predicts his own death and talks about his own death and he would die just hours later. So then on April 4th, the next day at 5:59 p.m., he walked out of his motel room.

He pulled down both lapels of his black silk jacket. He leaned over the balcony and he sees his friend Reverend Jesse Jackson is wearing a brown turtleneck and he says, "Jesse! We're on our way to Reverend Kyle's home for dinner and you don't have a tie on!" And he says, "Dr., the prerequisite for eating is an appetite, not a tie." So this is a congregation amongst friends. Ralph Abernathy is standing in front of a mirror putting on some Aramis aftershave and suddenly he hears what sounds like a firecracker. It was the shot of a rifle. A Remington Peters. Soft point, metal-jacketed bullet enters the right side of Dr. King's face just below his mouth fracturing his jaw and then exiting his face and hitting his neck. The bullet severed numerous arteries and fractured his spine in several places, coming to rest in the left side of his back. King falls backwards. His hands shooting up as if to hold his head. Dr. King is lying there in a pool of blood, his feet against the balcony rail, his knees raised, his right hand outstretched, his left flung behind him. The bullet had cut his brown tie in two, just below the knot, and blood was pumping from the wound.

Ralph Abernathy kneels by his mentor and his friend. We're told that he thinks he sees fear in Kings' eyes. "Martin," he said, "this is Ralph. Don't be afraid. It's going to be alright." Dr. King tries to say something. His eyes are glaring and King is rushed to the hospital at 7:05 p.m. and he is pronounced dead. The King was dead. At the White House in Washington, D.C., President Lyndon B. Johnson is told that King has died. Immediately he cancels a trip to Hawaii for peace talks on Vietnam, a war King was highly critical of.

And Johnson can hear the scream of sirens from fire engines just a few blocks away from the White House. Riots have broken out in the Capitol. It was 7:25 p.m., only 20 minutes after King's death. When something's fast, then we might not say that it travels at the speed of light. We might say that it travels at the speed of a riot because that's how quickly the information spread and people started rioting after King's death. And it is through the lens of the King Riots that I want to explore riots and unrest.

Not as some mindless crowd response or act of collective thuggery as it's so often portrayed by the dominant perspective. But I want to explore them as a phenomenon of those people in history who have come together consciously and collectively as they have all perceived some form of wrong or injustice. So this is a story of unlawfulness and unrest! This is a story of outrage! This is a story of upheaval and uprising! This is a story of disorder! This is a story of justice and injustice! This is a story of riots as told through the King Riots of 1968.

This is The Humanity Archive podcast. Let's get into it! Welcome to The Humanity Archive podcast. I am your gracious host, Jermaine Fowler and today I have a fascinating story from history that you've probably never heard before. But even if you have, you've never heard it in the way that I'm going to tell it. Today I'm going to talk about the King Assassination Riots of 1968. What spurred me to do this podcast is because I am living in one of those defining moments in history that I spoke about in the introduction. No doubt in my mind that 2020 will go down in a similar way as did 1968, the year that King was assassinated.

It is a year where the world has a revolutionary energy. This was also a year of riots and civil disobedience. And there's this saying, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." So make no mistake about it. I don't condone riots. It's wrong to burn down other people's homes and businesses, to steal, to loot, and terrorize. And let's be honest, riots are dangerous, scary, and destructive. But at the same time America and many, many, many other civilizations on earth were founded on riots. Citizens have always resisted power by using fists where their voices didn't draw a response.

In the Moral Economy of the Crowd, English historian E. P. Thompson, theorizes that riots aren't just some mindless collective action. He says, "It is possible to detect in almost every crowd action some legitimizing notion. By legitimizing notion I mean that the men and women in the crowd were informed by the belief that they were defending traditional rights or customs and in general that they were supported by the wider consensus of the community. On occasion this popular consensus was endorsed by some measure of license afforded by the authorities. More commonly the consensus was so strong that it overrode motives of fear or deference."

Motives so strong that they override fear. We can take a look at 1765, where crowd consensus was so strong it overrode fear. This was in response to the Stamp Act in which American colonists protested and those protests turned into riots. A contemporary at the time said, "a lawless rabble dismantled most of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson's Georgian mansion in a matter of hours. With axes they labored over it until dawn. Hutchinson's papers and valuables, bedding, and tableware afterward littered the streets. The house was a mere shell.

Not a book remained. Such ruins were never seen in America". And that was the complaint of the Lieutenant Governor himself after American colonists had rioted and destroyed his property, destroyed his home. He didn't even appear until the next day when he had to appear in borrowed clothes because he had to run away half-naked apparently to get away from it all. The American colonists were fighting to have a say so in how they were taxed. So there again is that legitimizing factor that overrode modes of fear and deference, which Thompson was talking about, an element of riots.

Riots usually spring up from a grievance and then become a form of protest or an attempt to raise awareness about an issue. Or some riots may just be outpours of frustration from the deprived, oppressed, and dispossessed. It often pits those who want radical change versus those who want to keep things how they are. In America we see riots go from this kind of universally common idea or sort of push back by people being oppressed or lacking or aggrieved in some way. So starting in earlier history and throughout most of history you have what is called 'Bread Riots' in Europe and elsewhere, where you have near-famines maybe from drought or war, and you can't eat so you riot and loot so you can eat.

An empty stomach overcomes fear real quick doesn't it? These same Bread Riots happened in America in the confederate south in 1863 when white men and women violently invaded stores, destroyed them, and they stole, and they ate. They were hungry. There was drought in these forging civil war armies who were eating all the civilian food stores and prices of food skyrocketed but the incomes of the Southerners did not. So what did they do? They rioted. So we can clearly see there is a continuum of riots throughout history. They are universal. No society has been without them. Riots are as human as a heartbeat.

But then you go from the Bread Riot to the Race Riot. And that's when the perception changed. That's when we see the riot as something of the other. As if they are a Black thing and not a human thing. So that same energy in 1968 of racial tension and 400 years of anti-Black violence sparked grief and rage. And again this happened in 2020. In the same year that I'm in now. That is the legacy that we're still dealing with. What we're talking about is throughout history riots have been a response to people being excluded in some way. Excluded from access to wages to satisfy their need to eat.

Excluded from democratic rights, excluded from justice. In 2020, we still have the issues of dilapidated housing, decrepit school systems, mass incarceration, massive unemployment, and underemployment, inadequate healthcare, and its violations of rights and liberties. All of these things disproportionately affect the Black community, followed closely by the Brown and Red communities. What do you have left to do in this situation but die a social death or fight? Riots can almost be seen like a collective fight or flight response. Now we're about to get into the King Riots but I want to pivot to my own time.

Still, again in 2020, people are very weary from the coronavirus pandemic, fearful of the deaths. Some are furious at the lockdown orders and tens of millions of people were out of work. A pandemic that has hit African-Americans harder than whites in the U. S., and the killings of Black people by police have escalated into a cold, hot mixture of protests and riots. Now if you're like me, you've noticed something about these riots. Many times those causing the destruction are not even people who have the grievances or who are doing the protest. Agent provocateurs are a known fact in the history of protest. An agent provocateur is French for inciting agent.

These have been people who commit or who act to entice other people, or groups of people, to commit illegal or rash acts, or falsely implicate them. And what the goal is, is to ruin the reputation or entice legal action against the group. So you might think I'm going down a rabbit hole here, but this is no conspiracy theory. And I just want to have a nuanced conversation because instigators have been a huge factor in the history of riots. If you study and dig into any riots, I guarantee you'll find an instigator somewhere. Sheriffs and police have been heavily involved in riots where whites have destroyed Black communities in history.

They've also instigated to de-legitimize legitimate causes and social movements that go against the status quo. In the publication, The Intercept, its journalists lay it out like this, "the best documented use of provocateurs by the U. S. government occurred during the Federal Bureau of Investigations counter-intelligence program, or COINTELPRO, from 1956 to 1971." One notorious example in May 1970, an informant working for both the Tuscaloosa police and the F.B.I. Burned down a building at the University of Alabama during the protest over the recent Kent State University shootings.

The police then declared the demonstrators were engaging in an unlawful assembly and arrested 150 of them. How governments handle riots isn't always by the book but this is the perspective of riots you don't hear about on the news. Now let's keep the nuance in this conversation and add this, lest you think riots are some recent problem. Just remember that riots have been going on the whole of the recorded human history. In 44 BC they rioted after Julius Caesar was assassinated in Rome. Matter of fact they rioted all the time in Rome. Burning down Senate houses, no Molotov cocktails at that point but regular old fire did the job.

Anti-Jewish riots occurred in Europe in the 14th century. Jewish people have been oppressed and subject to despicable, inhuman treatment for a long time. But those in Europe thought that the Jewish people caused the black death. Some say the only constant is change. You can say the only constant in history is riots. So then only the perception of whether the riots are justified changes. So then we turn now to 1968, when all of these anti-democratic forces of voter suppression, and segregation, and mass incarceration, and police militarization, impoverization, miseducation, all of these catastrophes coalesced on the Black community.

And then you get the national devastation in the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. This is what I've been setting up. Now to understand why these riots were the result of a moral uproar, you have to understand the love that the Black community had for Martin Luther King. I say Black community, not as everyone, because you have some Black nationalists who thought King was soft. They didn't like him but he was overwhelmingly viewed as a prince of peace. He was overwhelmingly viewed as courageous even if people didn't agree with him. Then on the other side you had some white people who loved King. But a majority, during his own time, thought he was an agitator or a rabble-rouser.

He was definitely agitating them. They didn't like him. A lot of them would have rather seen him dead. He was not very popular at the time. We're told that some white soldiers even celebrated King's death. One John Bracket recalled, "overt joy expressed by some of my white colleagues that this troublemaker had been eliminated." Overt hatred and callousness was how FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover viewed King when he said, "King was the biggest liar and communist in this country." Then California Governor Ronald Reagan said King's killing was a great tragedy but, he added, "tragedy began when we began compromising with law and order and people started choosing which laws they break."

There are clear undertones that had King stay in his place. Had he not inadvertently incited these riots, he might still be alive. But the love was there. And that love would be seen at his death. There were groans of despair throughout the nation. A lightning strike of agony shot through the hearts of so many Americans. Some stopped in their tracks on the streets or at their jobs and they broke down in tears. As a whole the African-American community was gripped by grief and rage. Some prepared for a race war. I read other stories of many Black people who contemplated suicide.

Prolific writer, James Baldwin, sums up the love so well when he describes the scene at King's funeral at Ebenezer Baptist Church, in Atlanta, Georgia, where about 50,000 people came together in mourning. Baldwin says,"the atmosphere was black. With attention indescribable as though something, perhaps the heavens, perhaps the earth, might crack. I did not want to weep for Martin. Tears seem futile. His death was too terrible. The void too deep. I may also have been afraid and I could not have been the only one.

That if I began to weep, I would not be able to stop." So you see I think the volcanic anger that erupted from the Black community after King's death was really based in this profound sadness and sense of injustice of being hurt. So I'm about to tell the story of these 1968 riots and I think you'll see some parallels to our own time. And I'll just ask you flat out, are riots a necessary evil? I think their value depends on who you ask. Those white people who burned down Blackwall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921.

They alleged Black people of criminality. They would have said they were needed to protect order and stability. Those Black folks on the other side of the riots, they would not have thought so. When people riot from hunger, they would say ask my stomach, yes my right is justified. But that person who is clutching to the bread, they would probably say not so much. It is all a matter of perspective, right? If you're someone who is benefiting from the status quo and you're the person with the bread and not the person without it, then you are going to condemn the bread riot. If you're someone who benefits from the racial hierarchy from white privilege and sits a top the caste-like social structure in America, then no, race riots are not a necessary evil.

If you're the shop owner who's building and livelihood was razed to the ground often by people in your own community, no riots are not a necessary evil. Yet those who are aggrieved in the long-term, history sometimes favor the collectively oppressed if what they were rioting over was tyranny or hunger. So when we look back at these riots, how will history look at them. Political activist Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense gave birth to the Declaration of Independence, America's founding document, what did he think about riots? That man who so influenced the founding fathers. What did he have to say when he was talking about the oppressed, working-class white man in Europe and America in the face of the tyrannical monarchy of the late 18th century.

He said, "if we look back to the riots and tumults which at various times have happened, we shall find that they did not proceed from the want of a government, but that government was itself the generating cause. Instead of consolidating society, it divided it. It deprived it of its natural cohesion and in gender discontents and disorders which otherwise would not have existed. Whatever the apparent cause of any riots may be, the real one is always want of happiness. It shows that something is wrong in the system of government that injures the felicity by what society is to be preserved."

So when we look back at riots in history, it doesn't seem like the great majority of people have a problem with riots as an idea for fulfilling the promise of democratic freedom. Sometimes riots have been overlooked when white people murdered Black people or ran them out of town. They were justified because maybe a Black man looked at a white woman a second too long, or maybe she looked back or maybe they alleged there were too many criminals in the community. We don't look at all white people as criminal because of those. But it is this criminalization of the Black community that is at the core of the disdain for the riots that still happen to this day. So I ask the critical question.

Is the problem with the riots or with who was doing the rioting? Because if rioting is to be condemned it should be condemned no matter who is doing it. If there are instances where it is justified, then those justifiable instances should apply across the board regardless of race, or class, or gender, or sexuality, or any other such factor. And that way we are upholding a moral consistency. Now back to 1968, this is America in the shadow of the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and here's a newspaper description of what went on during that time. It says, "President Johnson ordered 4,000 regular army and national guard troops into the nation's Capitol tonight to try to end riotous looting, burglarizing and burning by roving bands of Negro youths.

The arson and looting began yesterday after the murder of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis." In Washington more than 900 businesses were damaged. Many store owners rushed to put pictures of King up in the storefront windows. And one must wonder, as one does today, was this an act of true solidarity or an act of fear in hope that their shops would not be destroyed? Maybe the Black youth that the newspaper article was talking about saw these white grocery stores as a manifestation of injustice. Many may or may not have known or felt that, or maybe they weren't political at all. But across America there were outbreaks and broken store windows and firebombing in hundreds of cities; Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Chicago, Washington.

12,000 national guardsmen deployed here, 8,000 there. There were even snipers who targeted firemen attempting to put out the flames. In contrast, in New York, the aftermath was mild in comparison. People came out by the thousands and there was a tense peace and mourning and some property destruction but no guards had to be called out. For years historians and sociologists have been trying to study why in some cities there were riots and in some there weren't. So this makes me wonder again about the term riot and it's slippery because when does it go from a peaceful protest to a riot? When one garbage can is lit on fire? How many bottles have to be thrown at the police?

Does a riot start with the smashing of one store window or 20? Does it matter if the peaceful protestors aren't involved at all in the rioting? Or do people see non-violent and violent forms of Black insurrection on tv all as one big blur? And I wonder, because I read that the demographics of riots skew heavily to the youth. It's mostly young people who are the ones doing the rioting in any riot. I wonder how many of these riots aren't political at all in nature, and it's just an outgrowth of the political, into something where you just have kids who think they're just having fun.

The ones who cut school with some rebellious energy and they have this mentality, let's just go out and cut loose and have a little bit of teenage anarchy. Let's smash some windows. You also have to wonder because the guards and the police were ordered not to shoot and I wonder how many would have shot one of those kids if they could? Most of the people killed in riots, though, weren't from bullets, but they were burned up trapped inside of buildings. All of this to say there is a thin line between what one might call unrest, peaceful protest, and mayhem. It's also important to wonder, given that King was the equivalent of importance to the president of Black people in 1968 how might have white America reacted if a Black man had killed and assassinated the President, Lyndon B. Johnson? Looting and arson might be the least.

Those racist lynch mobs might well be resurrected. In a New York Times article dated April 6th, they report on the rioting in Chicago. It says,"A 28 block strip of Madison Street on the Negro west side bore the brunt of the anger that tore up Chicago yesterday. Today West Madison Street, a long finger of small shops, many topped by scar brick tenements, was occupied by national guardsmen. The guardsmen, the fatigue of long tense hours of duty showed in their eyes, were grouped at every corner bayonets at the ready. Blue-helmeted policemen prowled relentlessly along the debris strewn sidewalks. The flames that reddened the sky last night and into the early morning had been tamed for the most part, but weary firemen continued to pour water onto the smoldering buildings along the 28-block stretch.

Wispy, gray smoke lingered over most of the area. Negro residents were being kept off Madison, at least off the street. Some sat behind smudge windows in the tenements watching the fire hoses spray water on the buildings next door. But the side streets were choked off with traffic as hundreds of Negroes drove slowly along the edges of the devastated area. Cars had their headlights on in memory of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. whose assassination in Memphis apparently touched off the rioting there." There was one quote I read from someone who was there and it said, "I was just really surprised to see the hate on the faces. Young, beautiful Black boy faces."

A white person said, "the anger from King's assassination was like nothing I've ever seen." And they say this as if to say that after all those years of uncivility toward Black people by white people, that Black people were still expected to act civilized in every situation. After the Black community pumped out love warrior after love warrior non-violently for 200 years, who tried to write, speak, escape, vote, plead, beg, debate, argue, and assert their right to freedom in a civilized way. It's as if after all of this Black people lose all humanity, and are looked at as the plague of society when a riot breaks out.

As if riots haven't broken out across all races, civilizations and places in history. Rutgers professor Brittany Cooper writes about white reaction to Black anger when she said, "The mere fact that Blacks are protesting affects how white society sees those protests. Black anger, black rage, black distress over injustice is seen as one, unreasonable and out-sized, and two, as the thing that must be neutralized and contained quickly." Cooper says this often takes the form of whites, "preaching at Black people about how they're bad and how they're ungrateful for being angry." It's an interesting way to look at it. And again I'm talking about the racialization of riots as if they're not a human thing.

And no they are an other thing, a black thing, a thing to be placed upon the Black community as if it is something that white people throughout the history of America have been able to use to deny that there is humanity within the Black community and only criminality. And then there was Randall Harris who was actually there in Baltimore when the riots broke out. Remember, there's hundreds of cities where these broke out and a lot of these people are still alive today. So they're able to tell their stories now, looking back into the past. And he said, "someone was going to account for King's death. King was our voice. He was the poor voice for the nation. He was taken away and what are you going to do?

And he was the best of us. So we don't know what else to do except act out of the frustration of the enormous loss." And says Harris, he wasn't proud of his role in the looting and destruction razed on Baltimore's retail corridor. And then he says, "it didn't bring the kind of outcome we thought it would." The article goes on to say their show of rage, rioters thought then would bring attention to the plight of their community. So there it is. A different perspective on riots. Whether you agree or disagree with the method, the anger is there and it has to be dealt with regardless if there's destruction or rioting or not.

We see that riots have always been a weapon of the oppressed and the working class or people who have been aggrieved and think that their aggrievance is justified to go off and cause some destruction somewhere, many times starting as a protest. So it's almost as if a protest is a plea and a riot is more like a scream. We see that sometimes protests are infiltrated and that's what really starts the riots, outside instigators. Sometimes rioters beat and kill innocent people. They destroy whole businesses. More often, police and the military kill rioters.

Sometimes there's kids involved and they're the ones causing some of the destruction. Sometimes the police beat and maim the rioters in the name of law and order. And sometimes those doing the rioting have beat store owners. But more than sometimes at the bottom of riots is a lot of angry, very working-class, disillusioned, young men and women taking part in events that escalated out of conditions that for them they deemed as catastrophic like the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. The pendulum swings from the rational to the irrational, from the peaceful to the violent. But the foundation is the real human unhappiness.

I did not produce this podcast to talk about riots as a good or a bad, but to tell you that you have to look at each individual riot throughout history and judge it on its own merits. Also remember the underlying fact that riots are violent. And when there is violence there are victims. And the grand irony of the 1968 riots is that there may have been no other person in history as passionate about non-violence as Martin Luther King, Jr. but there it is from The Humanity Archive. No either/or perspectives here. It's about complexity.

It's about subtlety. That's how we look at history and there would be no better way to end this show other than with the words of King himself when he says, "I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive non-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with a problem from a direct action point of view. I am absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand here before you tonight and condemn riots.

It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without at the same time condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say that tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last 12 or 15 years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that the large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.

Now every year about this time our newspapers and televisions and people generally start talking about the long hot summer ahead. And what always bothers me is that the long hot summer has always been preceded by a long cold winter. And the great problem is that the nation has not used its winters creatively enough to develop the program, to develop the kind of massive acts of concern that will bring about a solution to the problem. And so we must still face the fact that our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. As long as justice is postponed we always stand on the verge of these darker nights of social disruption.

The question now is whether America is prepared to do something massively, affirmatively and forthrightly about the great problem we face in the area of race, and the problem which can bring the curtain of doom down on American civilization if it is not solved." Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for tuning into The Humanity Archive podcast. I am your gracious host, Jermaine Fowler, and this podcast was brought to you by my very own Patreon. If you go to www.patreon.com/thehumanityarchive what are you going to find there?

You're going to find study guides. You're going to find extra podcast episodes. You're going to find newsletters that I put out just telling you my thoughts on history tying it to the present. Always with the search for truth. Always trying to tie in my stories with a integrity and morality and consistency. I tell these stories with so much passion and trying to tell the stories of everybody for everybody. This is the history of humanity. I hope you join me next time where I'm going to round out this theme of riots and policing and the history of it all.

I thank you so much for lending me your ear, for joining me here. Support the show. I'll continue to put these podcasts out for free. I'll continue to be writing articles for my website for free, but this is a way that you can tangibly support the show and allow me to continue doing what I do, what I feel like that I do best and what I'm most passionate about. So until next time I am your gracious host, Jermaine Fowler.