Milwaukee’s answer to King’s assassination: Pray, then march
The shot that killed Martin Luther King on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, reverberated across America, including Milwaukee.
“Milwaukee was transformed into a city of sadness mixed with apprehension after word of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination rocketed across the nation Thursday night,” the Milwaukee Sentinel reported on its front page on April 5, 1968.
Milwaukee Mayor Henry Maier called a press conference at 10:30 the night of King’s murder to call for calm, saying “anyone who commits an act of violence in his name … is desecrating his memory and his cause.”
For what might have been the only time in their lives, Father James E. Groppi agreed with Maier.
Groppi, the adviser to the NAACP Youth Council and one of the leaders of Milwaukee’s open housing marches, gave a sermon the night of the assassination at St. Boniface Catholic Church at North 11th and West Clarke streets.
In his sermon, Groppi said: “We must ask ourselves to do what he would want us to do. We must be nonviolent in his honor.”
About 150 people took part in the April 4 service at St. Boniface, where the Youth Council later announced plans for a march to honor King the following Monday, April 8, starting at St. Boniface and heading downtown.
Elsewhere, King’s assassination triggered riots and violence.
In Milwaukee, with memories of the 1967 riot still fresh, the mood was wary. The night of King’s death, bars along North Third Street (now King Drive) closed early, and police beefed up patrols.
But except for a few isolated incidents, the city kept quiet.
Groppi was one of those trying to keep it that way.
At an impromptu memorial service at St. Boniface April 5, Groppi told about 1,000 students from central city schools to “cool it.”
“It would be a desecration of Rev. King’s memory to resort to violence,” Groppi said, according to a story in the April 6 Milwaukee Journal.
That didn’t mean things were calm. In Milwaukee, two outdoor memorial services were held that Sunday, April 7: a de facto “official” service in Washington Park, and another in Garfield Park organized by civil rights groups including the Youth Council.
While the service in Washington Park was somber, the gathering in Garfield Park (now Rose Park) reflected a different mood, according to a frontpage story in the April 8 Sentinel: “… A crowd of about 4,000 gathered to the chants of ‘black power, baby’ and heard shouts of ‘get your guns’ … ”
On April 8, the day of the Youth Council’s memorial march, the Sentinel ran a rare Page 1 editorial with the headline, “Keep It Calm.”
For the most part, Milwaukee did. Following a service at St. Boniface, marchers headed out on a 10-mile-plus trek — during which the crowd swelled to as many as 30,000 people. Windows were broken at 41 establishments, The Journal reported on April 9.
When the first store windows were shattered on Wisconsin Avenue, the Sentinel reported April 9, “a loud cry of ‘no’ was heard as the majority displayed its disapproval.”
After a few more windows were broken, police appeared with “drawn teargas guns and canisters. The Youth Council Commandos, however, as they did throughout the march, moved quickly and firmly. Locking elbows, they contained what threatened to become an unruly mob.”
Ben Barkin, the public relations maven who had helped bring King to Milwaukee in 1964 and a member of the Committee of We-Milwaukeeans, told The Journal the marchers displayed “amazing restraint and dignity,” calling it a cue for the city to step up and improve conditions for people of color.
“Let us not wait for another ghastly tragedy to shock us out of our indifference and apathy before we accord all our fellow Milwaukeeans the dignity every human being deserves,” he said.