Boiling over
In 1968, blacks north and south were long accustomed to being singled out for special treatment by the authorities.
Wesley Cates, now 66, was then a 16-year-old growing up on Columbus’ East Side. He said that black folks knew to avoid certain parts of town after dark.
“You didn’t even want to go through Bexley, because the story was they were going to stop you,” he said.
But Cates said the willingness to endure such constraints was diminishing as TV brought images of Southern police officers unleashing fire hoses and dogs on peacefully demonstrating black youth.
Cates also was talking to older guys who were returning from Vietnam — hardened, cynical and more militant. Then came the April 4 murder of King.
“We were just so mad. He was somebody who was peaceful,” Cates said. “We wanted to get them back. It was like somebody killed a member of your family.”
Joyce Beatty, now the congresswoman who represents much of Columbus, was a teenager in Dayton.
“It was killing,” she said of the assassination. “It was knife-stabbing.”
Columbus didn’t explode into riots like Cincinnati, Cleveland and scores of other American cities. Even so, Cates said, Jeeps of National Guardsmen, bristling with machine guns, prowled his neighborhood.
With a single shot, the movement to which King had devoted a dozen years lost precious ground. Many blacks lost faith in peaceful progress and many whites were terrified by the new black militancy.
“It was a witch’s brew of bad stuff,” Shkurti said. “Bad karma. All into the system at once.”
National hangover
Traumatized, the country voted in November 1968 to narrowly elect Republican Richard M. Nixon as president. He ran on a platform of “law and order” and an “honorable” peace in Vietnam. And he employed his Southern Strategy to attract the votes of segregationists who had previously voted for Democrats.
Rocky Saxbe, whose father in 1974 would be appointed U.S. attorney general by Nixon, said that the era resonates today.
“It’s a little bit like what we’re going through now,” he said. “It’s just a turmoil over where we’re headed and who is our leadership and do they get it? It’s just a disillusionment about who (we are). You’ve got an administration that is pitting us against each other, just like Nixon and (former Vice President Spiro) Agnew were pitting the ‘silent majority’ against everybody else. We had a president who later claimed that he wasn’t a crook and we’ve got a guy now who brings a lot of memories about how bad it can get.”
Beatty said the events of that seminal year changed her for the better.
“I cut my hair and got an Afro,” she said. “I started following critical history. I was black and proud.”
Cates, a former semi-pro football player, said some of the racial divide in ‘68 is still here today. It can be seen in differing views about NFL players taking a knee during the national anthem — an act that Cates says is not meant to disrespect the flag or the military.
“It’s like (1968 Olympic track medal winners) John Carlos and Tommie Smith putting up their fists,” he said. “We’re trying to make white people look. It’s about our rights. Our rights need attention.”