Sign up for our newsletters Subscribe
Friday, April 5, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr. was dead, and thousands of young protesters stalked the streets of Chicago, exhibiting a harsh, unbridled rage the likes of which the city had never seen. Those living amid the rioting could do little more than pray that some mob wouldn't converge on their building. Those living far away were gnawed by terror nonetheless, their fears fueled by the fires that illuminated the western sky.In his essay, Rivlin lamented that no Chicago media outlets had seen fit to look back on the 20th anniversary of the riots following King's assassination that, he argued, left a permanent mark on the city. This, he felt, "[confirms] the suspicions of a great many Chicagoans about the mainstream white media's lack of interest in the west side and in the black population in general." So four months later, on the eve of the anniversary of another 1968 riot in Chicago—the one downtown outside the Democratic National Convention—he decided the Reader should do it. He and six other writers interviewed 16 people—lawyers, politicians, shopkeepers, reporters—who had been there, and Hank De Zutter, who had covered the riots for the Daily News, provided a chronology of events.
It would be unfair to fault these journalists for looking back at such a pivotal event in their lives, but one can't help believing that if there were more blacks in positions of power in the media, some editor would have penciled in his calendar a reminder to commemorate the King riots in this their 20th anniversary year.This is still mostly true of Chicago newsrooms today. But over at Chicago magazine, someone had the sense to ask Eve Ewing to write a poem for their website. Here is "April 5, 1968," about the burning of Madison Street.
"It's a racial myopia," says Nate Clay, news editor of the Chicago Metro News, a paper that proclaims itself the "largest BLACK oriented weekly" in Chicago. "It's that simple. If you don't have people inside the editorial-board rooms who understood and felt the significance of these riots, you won't see any mention of the riots. It probably never crossed their mind."
Showing 1-4 of 4