- [Narrator] Coming up.

- [Schubert] All I could see was fire.

- You saw a lot of looting.

- It did look like a war zone.

- [Narrator] April, 1968.

Chicago's West Side bursts into flames after the news of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's assassination.

- [Reporter] --has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

- [Narrator] The one man who brought hope for a better life was dead.

- To cure the cancer of racial segregation.

- That man didn't deserve that.

- People who had pent-up frustration were letting it out.

- I do remember one guy standing out and, "Burn, baby, burn."

- A friend of mine drove his car into a supermarket.

This is crazy.

- [Narrator] The government responded with force.

- [Kelly] It looked like an invasion.

- That an order to be issued immediately to shoot to kill any arsonist.

- They chose brutality and we chose to rebel.

Couldn't kill us all.

They would never kill us all.

- [Narrator] "When The West Side Burned."

Next on "Chicago Stories."

(light music) (plucky music) - I was born in Roanoke, Virginia.

My household was a single parent household, just my mom and her six kids.

You hear about the Jim Crow South, separate but equal.

White water fountains, Black water fountains, not being able to get served at certain restaurants, all these type of things.

My mother, her family, had all migrated from Mississippi and they told her, "Well, come to Chicago."

- [Narrator] John Preston and his family migrated to Chicago in the late 1950s, and they were not alone.

After World War II, four million Blacks headed north, fleeing violence and looking for work.

A quarter million of them settled on Chicago's West Side.

Jobs were plentiful thanks to local manufacturers like Zenith, Western Electric and Brach's Candy.

- And they hired a lot of Black fathers.

And so you can go in one factory, get a job, quit and walk down the street and get another job.

- [Narrator] They became the backbone of the city's industrial might and spent their paychecks at white-owned stores in shopping districts along Madison Street and Roosevelt Road.

- This is where all the Blacks in that area would go shopping at.

You had Robert Halls, that's where most men go get their Easter suits at.

- [Narrator] They made a life for their families.

- It was a good childhood, having real friends, having neighbors who would invite you in, feed you, you know, with their children.

Just growing up in a good environment of love.

(explosion pops) - [Narrator] But Chicago was deeply segregated, and surrounding white communities were not welcoming.

- You'd see things in the boundaries of Chicago, where you want to go live at?

But no, that's a white neighborhood.

That's a Black neighborhood.

- You didn't hardly go past Cicero Avenue.

That was kind of the end of the Black community.

- I can remember catching the bus up to Riverview, wind up spending all your money.

You couldn't even get back home.

You had to walk back through those neighborhoods.

And getting chased by white kids because you're Black.

- I learned what racism was, what white supremacy was just from being on the track team.

Our uniforms were ragged hand-me-downs, and then when you go to a place like Palatine and you see these pristine uniforms, it was a thing of wanting to have that.

- [Narrator] And as the Black population grew, the white residents of the west side moved out.

- When I was, I think in eighth grade, the white kids left.

- As a result of that, you had massive school segregation.

- Black schools had no pieces of chalk, for example.

- I remember clear as day, they took away our playground.

- Remarks by teachers, "You people this," or, "you people might act like monkeys."

- [Eig] You had massive job segregation and discrimination in hiring.

- [Narrator] And the industrial jobs that had lured Black workers to Chicago were also leaving town.

- [Balto] By the late 1960s, 60% of those jobs are gone.

- [Daley] They went to the suburbs or moved down south and people lost their jobs.

- We understand the meaning of the word lack.

- [Narrator] By the spring of 1968, after a decade of white flight and disinvestment, the once vibrant west side was in crisis.

A presidential commission that examined urban areas across the country put it plainly.

Our nation is moving toward two societies, one Black, one white, separate and unequal.

- The famed Black sociologist St. Clair Drake said that the city of Chicago should be grateful for the fact that Black people had exercised such restraint.

He also asked the question, how long can this last?

(typewriter clacking) - Good evening.

Dr. Martin Luther King, the apostle of non-violence in the Civil Rights movement, has been shot to death in Memphis, Tennessee.

- I was just finishing up my paper route and it just came over the radio that Martin Luther King had been assassinated in Memphis.

- Police have issued an all points bulletin for a well dressed young white man seen running from the scene.

- My mother stopped everything and made us sit down and watch the news coverage of it.

My mother and father was concerned about the Blacks in the area of attacking the whites around and they didn't want to get us caught up in that.

- According to a companion, a shot was fired from across the street.

- I was downtown Chicago with my mom and we were taking the bus home and everyone on the bus was crying and upset.

I knew who he was, but I didn't really know who he was.

- In the friend's words, "The bullet exploded in his face."

- You knew something was about to happen that will change the flow of America.

- People wanted to rebel and you felt it and you felt it.

- [Narrator] Soon enough, the west side would erupt in a devastating rebellion, but for now, the community was in mourning.

To them, King was more than a celebrated civil rights leader, he had been their neighbor.

In early 1966, King moved with his wife, Coretta, and their four children into a rundown building near 16th Street and Hamlin Avenue.

It was his first attempt to bring the non-violent struggle for civil rights to the North.

- King moved over there.

It was so cool.

I had a chance to shake his hand, talk to him for a minute.

But he just wanted to show people that he could stay in the ghetto too.

You know, like that.

- [Narrator] He preached at the nearby Stone Temple Baptist Church.

- There were thousands of people there, including those who were standing outside just waiting to hear and see him.

- And I could see in my mind the excitement that people had about seeing somebody here with the status of Dr. King that they had heard about from Atlanta, they had heard about from the south, but now he was here in the north.

- [Narrator] And he befriended local merchants.

- My dad would always talk about how Dr. King would come in the store and buy newspapers.

Then Dr. King would travel down 16th Street.

He would go to Ms. Collins Barbecue, he would go to Mr. Woods pool hall.

- [Narrator] He even sat down with the leaders of a powerful local street gang, the Vice Lords, hoping to enlist them in his peaceful campaign to break the stranglehold of segregation.

- I became the youngest chief of the Vice Lord Nation at 13 years old.

The Vice Lords had a program called Tenants Rights Action Group, where they were challenging slumlords that were illegally evicting Blacks out of their apartments.

And so King met with the street gangs.

- The Vice Lords, they knew where he was.

King is here, okay, so they watched him.

Ain't nothing gonna happen to you, you in the neighborhood, we take care of this.

- [Narrator] King chose an apartment on the top floor of the dilapidated building to highlight the terrible housing conditions Blacks endured on the west side.

- The door didn't fully close so people were coming in and urinating in the stairwell.

The bathroom was leaky and rusted.

- [Narrator] But King wanted to dismantle something even harder to see: Chicago's racist real estate practices.

Black people were routinely denied mortgages.

Many mortgages had language barring Blacks from owning homes in white communities.

They were forced to buy at inflated prices, in contracts designed to leave them no equity if they missed a payment.

Many Black families lost everything.

- [Balto] What they are oftentimes faced with is white mobs who are throwing rocks through their windows, who are attacking their property, who are threatening their lives.

The big picture of rioting in the city of Chicago is of white folks rioting against Black people trying to live their lives.

- If that is any doubt in anybody's mind concerning whether we have a movement here in Chicago, you ought to be in this church tonight.

(crowd cheering) (crowd applauding) Don't give up!

- [Narrator] King had brought West Siders hope for a better life.

- But in one great outpouring all of us can begin to sing glory hallelujah, glory hallelujah, glory hallelujah, our God is marching on.

(crowd cheering) - [Narrator] But with his murder, that promise was destroyed.

(typewriter clacking) (sirens wailing) In the hours after King's death, the mood was tense in the city of Chicago.

Bob Black, the only African-American photographer on the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times, was listening to Black radio on his way home from work when he heard about an impromptu memorial at a nearby church.

- I was the only media person there.

You could hear some sobbing going on, people being comforted.

And then after a while, all of a sudden anger begins to creep in.

I was feeling the same way.

So I was expressing my own inner self through the pictures I was making.

(somber music) (typewriter clacking) - [Narrator] The next morning, Chicago winds awoke with a terrible sense of loss and foreboding.

Overnight, the nation's capitol and many other cities had erupted in a violent collective outpouring of grief.

Chicago's mayor, Richard J. Daley, was determined his city would be different.

Daley called King a dedicated and courageous American, and ordered city flags flown at half mast.

Advisors urged the mayor to call out the National Guard.

He waived them off, and instead mobilized thousands of police officers, confident they could manage whatever the day might bring.

- I was a patrolman, full of adrenaline, 21 years old.

I had seven o'clock roll call.

And they talked about there might be trouble.

Martin Luther King got killed.

Back in that time, nobody ever thought too much about race or whatnot, at least my group didn't think that much about it.

- [Narrator] The mayor stepped out of his office into a city on edge.

Standing in front of recent graduates from the Fire Academy, he may have wondered how quickly their training would be put to the test.

- And we lined up on the plaza out there and then basically after that, the mayor said, "You're a fine group of men.

You know, and you can return your coercion."

- [Narrator] Mayor Daley had a complicated history with King.

Four years earlier, Daley was on his side when King led the successful push for national civil rights and voting rights legislation.

But when King brought the fight for equality North to Chicago in 1966, Daley was not so supportive.

King shined a light on the slums of the west side, a reality Daley preferred to deny.

- [Daley] We have no ghettos in Chicago at all.

- [Narrator] Publicly, the mayor welcomed King.

- I remember meeting Dr. King when he came in to meet with the mayor, my dad.

It was filled with administrators, businessmen, and everyone was talking, but when he had walked in the room, it just was eerie, it was just dead silence.

Unbelievable, his presence.

I'll never forget him.

- He starts making demands, specific demands that they wanna see met, that they're not just here to make noise.

- Now is the time to cure the cancer of racial segregation.

Now is the time to get rid of the slums and ghettos of Chicago.

- I came to realize that we lived in a slum.

A woman with six kids and her living in a three-bedroom apartment and the landlord charging you a hell of a lot of rent.

- No one wanted to get up in the morning, or go to sleep at night fighting rats, living in substandard apartments with no heat administered by slum landlords and they don't give a damn about people in general.

- [Narrator] Daley knew all too well the pent-up heartbreak and anger of the West Side residents.

There had been three consecutive summers of unrest.

(gun banging) Where incidents, both tragic and ordinary, sparked violent clashes with police.

- In 1965, a fire engine is just careening out of control on the West Side and hits a light pole and topples it over and kills a Black woman.

- [Brooks] Word spread throughout the community.

Folks got angry, folks start tearing things up.

- [Balto] And there's three days of unrest on the West Side that follow.

- [Narrator] A year later, when King was living on the West Side, there was another uprising set off by a common summertime ritual: kids opening a fire hydrant on a hot day.

- Swimming pools were not something that were in abundance, so fire hydrants were just a way of cooling down.

- We put them tires over there and put that board in there and then the water shooting up.

- And the police came and turned it off.

And when they left, the kids turned it back on.

- [Brooks] They saw us as criminals because we trying to cool off.

- When they came back, they ran into some resistance with older kids throwing bottles and bricks at 'em and Mayor Daley called the National Guards out.

They could've figured out a better way of dealing with it, but they chose brutality and we chose to rebel.

- And King spends the entire night driving around the city trying to help in any way he can.

- (King) My wish tonight is you will join with us and try to help us get people off of the streets and urging them not to engage in acts of violence.

- [Narrator] The next summer brought more of the same.

King wrote, "Our national government is playing Russian roulette with riots."

- King is basically saying it's going to continue until we make fundamental reforms that show people we care about equality, that we're not just putting a Band-Aid on this.

- If you read Frantz Fanon, "The Wretched of the Earth," he talk about when you get a group of people that are being oppressed by an oppressor, the oppressor teaches the oppressed to be violent.

- [King] Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality.

- The general feeling of the citizenry is that they have been overpoliced.

- We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

- When I was growing up, police were everywhere.

Get your butt off that corner or you're going to jail, I'm gone.

- It was nothing for the police to arrest you and slap you around and beat you.

- So it was not a crime to kill a Black person.

All you had to do is shoot 'em and drop a gun or knife down by 'em with no questions, with no investigative reporting.

And these are things you see as a kid.

(typewriter clacking) - [Narrator] As the hours passed on Friday morning, the fear of violence grew.

Police assured store owners they would protect their shops from looters.

And businesses across the West Side were shuttered.

- Said, you gotta close up, get outta here by 12, 12:30 because there might be some trouble on the street and we want all the businesses closed so we can protect them.

That was the day before the Easter business.

We sold boys suits, we had bonnets for girls.

- [Narrator] City schools remained open.

They planned memorials in an attempt to keep young people off the streets.

- I talked at a school on the west side of Chicago.

It didn't take long for us to know that we didn't have any control.

Kids would just walk out of school.

- [Narrator] One newspaper account read the high schools began to pop like kernels in a kettle of sizzling oil.

At Marshall High School, students pulled fire alarms and poured into the streets.

They began a spontaneous memorial march and soon their ranks swelled to thousands as teens from other nearby schools joined.

At Providence, the all girls Catholic high school on the edge of Garfield Park, students gathered in a memorial mass led by a monsignor who had fought alongside King.

- The senior choir that had just given their spring concert sang to dream the impossible dream.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, the public school students peacefully marched west and crossed the racial dividing line of Cicero Avenue.

When they reached the doors of the mostly white Austin High School, they were met by a wall of police.

- They drove us over to Austin High School, a large crowd out there.

- [Narrator] Police fired a warning shot.

Things quickly devolved.

- They were throwing things at us and everything.

At that time our commander reported us to move them down Pine Avenue to Madison Street.

- [Narrator] The confrontation with police fed the crowd's ferocity as they ran towards stores on Madison Street and nearby Providence High School.

- The mass is finishing, and I noticed that the principal of the school was coming in and tapping some of the girls on the shoulder, and they were the white girls, and they were getting up and leaving and she said, "A riot has started."

I said, "Well, I don't think the Black students wanna be in the midst of a riot anyway.

Shouldn't everyone go home?"

And the next thing you know, everything fell apart.

- [Narrator] Mary Pat Cross was a junior at Providence, living nearby with her family.

- Normally I would walk through Garfield Park, but I took the Madison Street bus.

It was about 11:00 AM and all along were people sitting along the streets and I could just see this elderly lady getting beat up.

I just reacted and I got off and I went to go get this lady and they knocked my books out of my hands and they started beating me up.

The bus I was on left, I could hear it leaving, and one woman put her arm around me like she was gonna kind of help me out.

And she really smacked me like really hard.

- [Narrator] A second bus pulled up and the driver jumped off to come to their aid.

- He was a young Black guy and he was screaming, "They didn't do anything to you."

And the lady got on the bus, I got on the bus, he got on the bus and they pulled me off the bus over him.

- [Narrator] The driver dragged Cross back on the bus.

She rode the final block home, got off and ran.

- And I ran through the alley and I ran in the back door.

My brother was a policeman.

When he saw how beat up I was, he got his gun and he wanted to go kill everybody.

I couldn't open this eye for a while.

I had like on my back, my arms, bruises.

I mean the worst part was my face.

- Then people started to loot.

A friend of mine, he said, "You want a ride?

Come on, get in."

And he drove his car into a supermarket and I'm saying, "Why you doing that?"

I said, "Let me out.

I mean, I'm a school teacher.

I don't want the police."

He said, "We're the police today."

- Police were nowhere in sight.

- [Narrator] Police were concentrated downtown because that's where city officials expected trouble.

While a few hundred West Side teenagers did smash downtown store windows, police quickly chased them back towards the West Side where they rejoined the developing mayhem.

- Me and my crew, our main interests were stealing something of value.

Not the bus windows, and didn't destroy property, just the loot.

We were grabbing things like gym shoes.

This sports store called Klein's right in the 4500 block on Madison.

They had those gym shoes.

Chuck Taylor's, that's where our heads was at.

- Klein's Sporting Goods store.

They were a mail order house that mailed out guns.

This was a big fear by our bosses at the time that if they hit this store that it would be really bad for the city of Chicago.

- They were dragging television sets, opening trucks that had merchandise, throwing meat out of meat trucks.

- I did see four people carrying different sections of a couch.

- These were things people needed.

People want clothes.

- They're breaking into cleaners, stealing clothes out the cleaners, them people live around there.

What you going take they clothes for?

They see you in their clothes, they're gonna beat your ass.

- And I remember one girl telling me later how angry her mother was.

Someone came to the door to sell her her own dress that they had gotten from the cleaners.

- And it's like, man, man.

And it just kept going.

Did I participate in it?

Of course, I was out there.

Where else was I going to be?

It's sad, because we did this through our youthfulness, through our naivety.

I was 19 then, so I've learned.

I wouldn't have done what I did.

I was just like everybody else.

Mad, angry, upset.

- You had people telling you get in the house, you don't belong out here.

You should be safe.

Where's your brother?

Where's your sister?

- You kind of became fearful that people might lose their lives.

- [Narrator] The West Side was officially up for grabs.

- The police superintendent, he said, "Mr. Mayor, we cannot control this.

We cannot handle it and cover the entire city of Chicago at the same time."

- [Narrator] Mayor Daley reversed course and called out the National Guard.

They would not arrive for hours.

He then stepped into City Council to oversee a memorial.

Jesse Jackson, who had been at King's side when he was assassinated, was also there.

- So to those of you who were in positions of power, drop your spears.

- [Narrator] Jackson had worked alongside King in Chicago and was critical of Daley.

Jackson said King's blood was on the chest and hands of those who would not have welcomed him here yesterday.

In 1966, Daley had been slow to negotiate with King.

So, King forced Daley's hand by organizing a march into a southwest side neighborhood, known to be hostile to integration.

- He knew the white community would counter protest.

There were people in trees, rocks were being thrown from all directions.

It was like guerilla warfare.

A rock hit him in the back of the head and King described it as feeling like he'd been shot.

- I've been in many demonstrations all across the south, but I can say that I have never seen, even in Mississippi and Alabama, mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen in Chicago.

- [Narrator] The attack on King made national news and the bad press forced Daley to the negotiating table.

- And my dad said, "What do you need?

How can we work with you?

What are your requests?"

And I think, if I recall, they complied with most of it.

- No specific commitments were made.

We requested- - [Narrator] The mayor abruptly announced that he would fix the problems of the slums within a year.

- I'm not proud of the slums.

I would hope that tomorrow every slum building in Chicago would be demolished and we'd have a decent home and a decent apartment for every family.

This is the aim of this present administration and- - I think that most of Daley's supporters watching that news conference knew exactly what Daley was doing.

That he was just saying this to get King to leave town.

- And he said that, Mayor Daley, he probably outsmarted me.

(typewriter clacking) - [Narrator] As Friday's City Hall memorial for King wound down, Chicago Sun-Times rookie reporter Ben Heinemann Jr. stood in the paper's newsroom and looked west.

He saw a shocking sight.

- You could see a column of smoke rising from the West Side.

I remember to this day vividly, this very straight up column of smoke and everybody said, "Holy cow," or... (Heineman) I think it was a city desk person who said to me, "You and Bob Black, get out there as fast as you can and report what's going on."

- [Narrator] Reporters from the major print, radio and TV outlets descended on the scene.

It was risky and some were attacked.

- I should have been terrified.

I mean, I was a white kid, literally wearing a short sleeve shirt, white shirt with a little tie on.

I just ran headlong into it.

But I want a good story.

Buildings were burning, there was looting, there were people fighting with each other.

- All the windows torn out and the glass all over the street and even cars were overturned.

(light jazz music) It was kind of sad.

All that stuff was going up in smoke.

It did look like a war zone.

- [Narrator] The first fire had started mid-afternoon when a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the window of a store on Madison Street.

- We had a place called Larry's on the corner and my friend went in there and burned it up.

I said, "Man, why'd you burn this place up?

They ain't did nothing to you."

- There was an extra alarm on Madison Street and this is where it starts to pick up.

We got to Western and Madison, saw a lot of smoke as we're coming up.

Almost 180 degrees in front of you.

Wow, I never saw this before.

- [Narrator] Fires were popping up across a two square mile area of the West Side.

Soon, the shopping districts were ablaze.

- I do remember the one guy standing out and "Burn, baby, burn."

And "Burn, baby, burn."

And I looked up and I saw children looking out.

This is crazy.

- Dr. King said riots are the voice of those unheard.

- Those of us who have been trampled over by the iron feet of oppression so long.

- And when something happens that really gets them all upset, the reaction is what you get from the unheard.

- And what are people not hearing?

- That is a danger than it ever present temptation.

We will retaliate with violence.

- People are seeing business owners in Black communities as being, if they're not Black, as being kind of predators financially of the Black community.

People are rebelling against larger structural forces.

- I got a call from one of my workers telling me, "Sol, they broke into the store and they're taking everything out."

And then about an hour and a half later he says, "It's all on fire.

They torched it."

- Yeah, they were owned by white folks.

Sure, you know the grocery stores, you know the furniture stores, the record shops, you know.

- Because they're the ones who had the money and had the resources to open up businesses.

(Brooks) But damn, this is your neighborhood.

You know what I'm saying?

- There were some African Americans who owned small business establishments and some of them actually made sure that they sat in their places with their weapons.

My cousin sat in his record shop, Barney's Records, and protected it.

- Some leaders of the Vice Lords, they told my father specifically, they said, "Go home."

They said, "We got you.

Nothing's gonna happen."

At that time, there were white-owned drug stores on every corner from Kedzie to Kostner.

All those were torched, but my father was unscathed.

- [Narrator] But not every Black owned business fared as well as Del-Kar Pharmacy.

Brenetta Barrett helped first time business owners get grants to open stores in the neighborhood.

- Some of my clients who had just opened their new businesses on Madison Street or Roosevelt Road or what have you, were having their businesses set fire, and some small businesses started to put signs saying they were Black owned.

- You needed to have a Soul Brother sign on you there, they would give you a pass on it.

But the one guy had Soul Brother on it and they burned them.

- I noticed that when people get angry and really mad, they really don't care who owns it.

- [Narrator] On the streets of the West Side, police and firemen were facing a population in full rebellion.

Dozens of officers were injured and two suffered gunshot wounds.

- A lot of the guys didn't have helmets.

They never issued them at that point, the blue helmets.

I ended up borrowing my buddy's white motorcycle helmet.

A lot of the guys brought their own rifles with them.

- As we went down Washington Boulevard, nobody was saying a thing.

We were all hunched down and on the hose bed and we saw police standing with rifles.

- [Narrator] Adding to the chaos, electrical power to the West Side went out.

- Anytime situations occurred, they cut the power, cut the power.

For one thing, make you afraid.

- All the stoplights went dark too.

And it was a sense that we were in another time.

- (O'Shea) Crashing glass, burning buildings, loud noises.

The districts had deteriorated the district lines.

Usually you keep within your own district.

We were just driving all over the place.

Most people on this earth will never be exposed to what we were exposed to out there.

- [Narrator] For people living in the neighborhood, it was terrifying.

One west sider pleaded with firefighter Schubert to help her escape.

- She was a Black woman with the two children in the backseat.

She was crying and she asked me, where could she go.

- [Narrator] Schubert pointed her north, away from the fires.

- Get on the street that's going north, keep going, keep going until you don't see us anymore.

- Oftentimes you'd see the firefighters, they had tried their best to stop the fires and you could see them sitting on the side of the street on the curb.

They're just worn out to the last bit of strength that they had.

- I gotta tell you this, when I went up to the bunk room to go to bed and I closed my eyes, all I can see on this side of my eyelids was fire.

- [Narrator] As the fires raged, casualties mounted.

In total, 11 people would lose their lives.

Six were shot by police and four of those deaths were especially troubling.

(typewriter clacking) - The Friday night of the uprising, there were reports, verified reports of police in unmarked cars firing their rifles, not in the air in any sort of warning shot, but instead firing them level indiscriminately and four people were killed.

- I spent about a week just pounding the pavement, trying to find out who was killed, when they were killed.

It became clear that four men had been killed by gunshots in a three-hour period, all in a very, very close proximity to each other.

Two were killed in stores and two were killed in the alley behind the stores.

They may have been looting, but even the ones in the stores they were never found with either weapons or property.

- [Narrator] 31-year-old Robert Dorsey died in his wife's arms in an alley.

She told Heineman they were trying to get home and hid there to escape the chaos on the street.

- And an unmarked car came by and shot him, killed him.

Many eyewitnesses saying that they had seen police cars, unmarked police cars with rifles or shotguns.

Rogue cops had killed four people.

- [Narrator] Heineman's reporting would be front page news in the week after the uprising.

But the headline would not be the indiscriminate killing of four people by police who used deadly force in clear violation of department policy.

Heineman confronted his editor.

- And he just said, "We're the liberal paper, we've done all we can.

We can't go after the cops anymore."

And they changed the story to make it sound like it was suspicious.

And I blamed the paper, but I also blamed myself.

We had plenty of evidence, we could have gone further.

- [Narrator] Later, a commission appointed by Mayor Daley to investigate the cause of the uprising, invited Heineman to share his notes.

- The Riot Commission Report said there was a very questionable thing, but they didn't, they didn't really press it.

I can write a great story.

That story won the Newspaper Guild Award for best news feature of 1968.

But so what?

The guys died and there was no accountability.

- [Narrator] With their neighborhood in flames, Mary Pat Cross and her family huddled in their apartment.

- It was pitch dark.

You smell the fire, there's no one you can call.

You could hear shooting.

My brother would run out and try to get a squad car.

And finally he got one and they took half of us.

When they came back, the policeman said, "You can't take the dog."

And my mom said, "Then I'm not leaving."

And so they took our dog, Sparky, and he said, "This is as far as I can take you."

Literally it was seven blocks from where we lived.

Here we all are standing there feeling like we were leaving everyone there and it was burning.

I was leaving all my friends and it wasn't like our apartment, but it was just, what are they gonna do?

(somber music) (fire rustling) - [Narrator] Jeffrey Haas, a recent law school graduate, was working in a legal aid office in a south side housing project.

Concerned Black coworkers, fearing for his safety, encouraged him to leave.

- I went home that night and watched TV and I said, "I think they're just arresting every Black kid who's on the street."

And so I went down to 11th and State to represent people who were arrested that afternoon.

- The police department basically spread officers out 50 people wide on city streets and just walked through and grabbed everybody that was out.

We're talking mass arrests.

- If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong color of your skin, then you got arrested.

- The commission that studied it said there were 3,000 people arrested.

3,000 is a lot of people.

It's probably five times as much as people who are actually violating criminal law.

- [Narrator] The holding cells at 11th and State overflowed with Black men in their teens and early twenties.

- I started taking down people's names and basically trying to find out their age.

Did they go to school?

Did they live with their family?

Did they have a job?

Then this other lawyer wandered in and he said, "Well, the judge is here, the word is from above.

Keep these kids off the streets, make sure they don't make bail."

And I tried to argue to the judge, look, he lives with his parents.

He has school tomorrow.

He has a job to go to.

And most of the young men had to stay in jail, but we did get some out.

(typewriter clacking) - [Narrator] In the early hours of April 6th, under the cover of darkness, Mayor Daley rode into the West Side to see the destruction firsthand.

Daley asked, "Why did they do this to me?"

Hours later, as the sun rose, West Side residents awoke to find themselves in the middle of a full scale military operation.

- [King] The ultimate weakness of a riot is that it can be halted by superior force.

- We saw the National Guard coming into Garfield Park, putting up tents and literal tanks.

I just didn't think that I would see my city of Chicago become, it looked like an invasion.

- [Narrator] 7,500 National Guardsmen had arrived overnight.

- They had a tank on on Roosevelt Road and Pulaski with troops lined up and down the street.

- [King] We have neither the techniques, the numbers, nor the weapons to win a violent campaign.

- One of the little kids ran up and started to yell, "Draft dodger, draft dodger," because his brother was in Vietnam.

And as far as he was concerned, these were the guys that had found a way not to go to Vietnam.

- [King] Our power does not reside in Molotov cocktails, in rifles, knives and bricks.

- I remember when we rode in the neighborhood, the sergeant saying, "Hold those weapons high, make these people see that you mean business."

- (King) Many of our opponents would be happy for us to turn to acts of violence in order to have an excuse to slaughter hundreds of innocent people."

- You saw National Guardsmen posted at every bridge and every entrance along 290 on both sides of it.

People couldn't cross those bridges and basically we were contained.

- Yeah, it just felt kind of eerie to walk down the street and there are these soldiers standing there with their weapons.

This is the nature of things.

- [Narrator] Despite an overwhelming military presence, 5,000 US Army troops arrived as reinforcements.

They set up encampments around the city.

The mayor ordered an unprecedented 7:00 PM curfew for all residents under the age of 21.

Liquor and gun sales were banned.

- You had to be in your house, wasn't no going to work.

Or you could, if you had to go to work, you had to wait until six o'clock.

I was able to maneuver through 'cause I guess they perceived me as a non-threatening 13-year-old kid.

I'm going to deliver papers this way.

Okay, go ahead.

- We were told that there was a sniper in an alley.

We were creeping down the alley.

It was very, very dark and all you could see was the dark shape of the fire escape zigzagging up the side of the building.

We heard a clink.

People kind of got on the ready, ready to shoot at whatever was up there.

And about that time a woman stuck her head out and said, "Joey, get yourself back in here right now and go to bed."

He was not a sniper, he was just a little kid.

And that just blew me away because I realized how close we came to maybe somebody taking a shot at that kid.

- [Narrator] The experience changed Dave Jackson.

He left the National Guard and was granted an honorable discharge as a conscientious objector.

- I was told I was the first one that that had ever happened to in the Illinois National Guard.

(typewriter clacking) - [Narrator] Palm Sunday, the first day of Easter week.

A religious procession moved reverently down the street lined with National Guardsmen.

In a gesture of peace, a parishioner handed a palm to one of the soldiers.

- And he took it and dropped it on the ground.

And that was shocking because these probably were Catholic guys and there was a sense that even this thing that we should have shared was not gonna be that easy.

- [Narrator] As power was restored, the nearly 1,000 people left homeless, found neighbors ready to help.

- We had a pantry.

People started to come to get groceries.

- The Vice Lords, they were able to set up relief sites, then they did some clothing drives, donations and all that.

So the community came together to help the community.

- [Narrator] After 48 hours of unrest, the rebellion was quashed by a combined force of 18,500 Guardsmen, troops and police officers.

Business owners returned to see what remained.

- I thought maybe they left part of the building so I can go back to work, build it up.

But it was gone, everything.

They were buying things from me, I was offering things to 'em at a price they could afford.

I don't know where so many people had arguments against us, but it happened.

- [Narrator] The decimation of more than 200 buildings gave way to demolition.

- It was just amazing how Madison Street was destroyed.

Roosevelt Road was destroyed.

It looked like something outta Berlin in 1945.

- [Kelly] And we thought that the neighborhood was gonna be rebuilt.

- I was faced with trying to respond to inquiries about some of the small businesses, whether any of them were insured.

The news was pretty bad.

- We had insurance.

Well, I didn't hear from that company till about maybe 10 years later.

We got a check for $5,000.

- (Preston) But the full impact really didn't hit until probably the next weekend, Easter weekend.

People wanted Easter clothes and there was nowhere to go buy Easter clothes.

- And when we came back, the National Guard said to my mom, "This is not a tourist area."

And she said, "We live here."

You could still smell the burning.

Everything from that point on, it was different.

I was real angry because I felt like I hadn't done anything to anybody.

I didn't understand the connection with Dr. King until we had a Black history class, and that is when I understood what the riot was about.

(typewriter clacking) - [Narrator] A week after the uprising, published reports that police were not given clear orders to quickly shut down the rioting, upset the mayor.

- I was disappointed to know that every policeman out on the beat was supposed to use his own decision.

- [Narrator] Daley wanted his police superintendent, and the entire city, to know exactly what would happen to the next person caught rioting in Chicago.

- He goes to City Hall and gives probably the most famous statement he ever uttered.

- To issue a police order to shoot to maim or cripple anyone looting any stores in our city.

- Despite the fact that the police were arresting everybody in sight on the West Side, despite the fact that police were killing people on the West Side, Daley thought it wasn't enough.

- To shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in their hand in Chicago, to fire a building because they're potential murders.

- It was taken by the public and the police to mean that these weren't humans that were out there.

- Couldn't kill us all.

They would never kill us all, you know.

- [Narrator] In time, the Army and the National Guard packed up their tents and rolled out of town.

- On the way home, riding in the back of the truck, there was a guy sitting there and he pulled out a personal private pistol and started shooting in the air.

- [Narrator] Within a few decades, the West Side's 250,000 Black residents were mostly gone.

- Now, I guess there might be 50,000.

- [Narrator] Some businesses reopened, like Sol Kaplan's.

- We figured some of the customers will hear about us and come back to us.

- [Narrator] Nearly 60 years later, the West Side has yet to be fully rebuilt.

- Today, when you ride down Roosevelt Road, you go down Madison, them vacant lots are still vacant.

- It was just a few days of hell, three or four days of hell, and then just normal again.

- [Fitzpatrick] As if nobody cared.

- [Crowd] Black Lives Matter!

Black Lives Matter!

Black Lives Matter!

- [Narrator] Many of the social issues that led to the uprising remain unresolved.

- Racism is not just about people not getting along.

I think that segregation, when you drill down, is also about financial equity.

- [Narrator] Without equity, community leaders are left to do what they can.

- We've been at this present location since 1964.

Over here, it's love, it's respect.

We all support one another.

But I promise you, it's a headache.

- [Narrator] Outside Del-Kar Pharmacy, a mural celebrates the history of Black leadership on 16th Street, giving the neighborhood a focal point for reflection as they pursue their dream for the future.

- I have a great depiction of Martin Luther King.

I got a picture of my dad out there.

And I'm doing my part every day to continue his legacy.

- The death of Dr. King helped us to better understand how imperfect this union is, but I also think that he gave us hope that we can keep moving towards the perfection that is yet to come.

- West siders are survivors.

West siders are dreamers.

West siders believe that they can do better.

- And so the struggle continues to try and make the King dream real.

(light jazz music)