In the wake of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968, a wave of riots erupted throughout the United States — leading to the occupation of Baltimore, Chicago, and the District of Columbia by federal troops and the mobilization of the National Guard in a dozen more. The violence lasted for a week. Clay Risen gives some numbers in the opening pages of A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination, just published by John Wiley & Sons: “39 people were dead, more than 2,600 were injured, and 21,000 had been arrested. The damages were estimated at $65 million—about $385 million today.”
But when Risen, the managing editor of the journal Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, told people he was working on a book about the ‘68 riots, he says they often assumed he meant the police melee at the Democratic national convention in Chicago a few months later. The post-assassination upheaval — which engulfed more than 100 cities — gets a brief nod in accounts of the Sixties, of course; yet the details remain vague, as if our historical memory had somehow erased most of them. Drawing on contemporary accounts, government reports, interviews, and archival sources, Risen presents a narrative history of some of the events of that catastrophic week.
“A race war did in fact come to America that day,” he writes, “but it turned out to be a cold war, not a hot one. When the smoke cleared and the sirens ran down, an invisible wall went up between urban and suburban America, every bit as real as the one in Berlin.... In the worlds of legal theorist Jonathan Simon, in the 40-year wake of the riots, ‘Americans have built a new civil and political order structured around the problem of violent crime.’” But evidence suggests that the riots were hardly the work of street thugs. “There was no ‘typical’ rioter,” notes Risen, “but the statistically average profile was better educated and more likely to be employed than most people in the riot area....Such results underscore an alternative theory of ghetto rioting: that it was at least as much an expression of protopolitical anger as it was of opportunism and common criminality.”
With its emphasis on the political logic of racial backlash, A Nation on Fire shares themes with Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland — but it also seems strangely contemporary at a time when fresh surges of “protopolitical anger” are in the air, worldwide. (Street demonstrations have just toppled the government in Iceland, for example.) Risen agreed to answer a series of questions about his book by e-mail. A transcript of our exchange follows.
<http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/01/28/mclemee>