After MLK was killed, Oakland was ‘not for burning!’
Major rioting broke out in about 100 American cities after the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., with the worst taking place in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Kansas City. Property damage and loss of life were rampant and much of the land was engulfed in grief and fear.
But Oakland, with a large African-American population long in conflict with local police, had no significant rioting, despite a shootout between the city’s police and the Black Panther Party that resulted in the death of 18-year-old Bobby Hutton and the wounding of Eldridge Cleaver, the group’s minister of information.
How come? I know from direct involvement that a very important factor was the presence of a well-planned crisis information hotline center run by a group known as Alamo Black Clergy.
Fifty years later, with the virtually instantaneous spread of news and lies, we can learn from the past how serious people can effect positive good when they plan and execute intelligently.
The militant ABC was committed to “Oakland’s not for burning!” because they knew that black communities suffered the most in urban riots. They felt strongly that their parishioners and the businesses they relied on should be protected — and they feared that false rumors could easily trigger serious conflagrations.
The Alamo Black Clergy consisted of pastors actively involved in the civil rights struggle and committed to working together, especially in times of crises. It got its name from a suburban retreat center where they had their organizing meeting.
Its founding leader, W. Hazaiah Williams, was a charismatic leader who was also a member of Berkeley’s school board. He had attended Boston University School of Theology at the same time as King.
The group created a crisis hotline for emergencies, using facilities — and multiple phone lines — of a nonprofit on Berkeley’s “Holy Hill,” where many seminaries were located.
They also organized a network of churches, civil rights organizations and community/neighborhood groups that would inform the hotline center of what was going on in neighborhoods — and check with it frequently to make sure that information being spread was true.
After King’s death, the hotline was activated, with roundthe-clock coverage by ABC members and their recruits. The center also had regular phone contact with media, civil rights groups and Berkeley-based radical groups. As a white seminarian, I was a part of this activity for about a week, subsisting on brought-in food and sleeping-bag-on-thecouch slumber.
The first two days after the assassination were pretty calm locally, but the potential for mayhem became serious on April 6, when the West Oakland shootout resulted in major injuries to two police officers, the death of Hutton and the wounding of Cleaver.
Then things became intense because the rumor was spreading quickly that Cleaver had died. This could have easily provoked a major riot because of his fame and notoriety.
People at the center were soon phoning contacts to deny the rumor, but no one could reach by phone some of the Berkeley radical groups that had very different attitudes about rioting.
In one of the strangest nights in my life, ABC leaders dispatched me to go to several Berkeley communes, dorms and contacts they had to inform them that Cleaver was alive.
Once that rumor was suppressed not much happened in Oakland, despite massive destruction in other cities. Much of the credit should go to the Alamo Black Clergy and its commitment that Oakland was not for burning.
I like to think that Dr. King would have been most proud of how Oakland reacted to his death. At an awful time in our history, a small group of Christians experienced how a beloved community working for peace could prevent a lot of grief.