1968 Baltimore Riot

People

James Harrison; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Outcome

unknown

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. While Baltimore remained calm for two days following the news, grief turned to rage on the evening of Saturday, April 6, when windows were smashed on the 400 block of Gay Street in East Baltimore. Within hours, the violence spread across the city, with fires, looting, and clashes with police erupting along Gay Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, North Avenue, and other commercial corridors. By 10 p.m., Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro III, who had been in office only 75 days, requested that Governor Spiro Agnew deploy the National Guard. An 11 p.m. curfew was imposed, and 6,000 National Guard troops flooded the streets. When the Guard could not contain the uprising, President Lyndon Johnson invoked the Insurrection Act, sending 5,000 federal troops from the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, armed with fixed bayonets. The uprising lasted from April 6 to April 14, 1968, leaving six people dead, over 700 injured, and more than 5,800 arrested. Rioters set over 1,200 fires and damaged or destroyed more than 1,000 businesses, causing an estimated $13.5 million in property damage. The hardest hit areas were the Black commercial districts along Gay Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, where one-third of businesses never reopened. The uprising was fueled by decades of systemic racism, including substandard housing, high unemployment (double the national rate for Black residents), infant mortality, and police brutality. Baltimore was among the three cities hardest hit by the nationwide Holy Week Uprising, alongside Washington, D.C. and Chicago. On April 11, after the unrest subsided, Governor Agnew summoned 80 Black community leaders to a meeting where he blamed them for the violence and accused them of being afraid to stand up to "Black radicals." Most walked out in protest. Agnew's confrontational approach caught the attention of Richard Nixon's campaign, and he was selected as Nixon's vice presidential running mate. The riot accelerated white flight from Baltimore, with the city's population declining from 906,000 in 1970 to 787,000 in 1980. Corridors like Gay Street, Pennsylvania Avenue, and North Avenue still bear visible scars from the destruction more than 50 years later, representing both the immediate devastation and the long-term disinvestment that followed.