Wilmington Civil Rights Riots / Occupation (1968 – 1969)
Thursday, April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tenn.
Sunday, April 7: Church leaders hold memorial and prayer programs in Wilmington's Rodney Square.
Rioting begins
Monday, April 8: In the morning and afternoon, schools hold memorials in Rodney Square. Several young people slip away, march down Market Street and cause disturbances, tearing up a few stores, but they are convinced to disperse mainly by black leaders who say rioting will not help and that violence disrespects King.
At night, violence erupts in an area of the city known as "The Valley." City, county and state officials declare states of emergency, with a 10:30 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew.
Special police squads are formed and dispatched to "The Valley."
Vandalism, looting, shooting and firebombing continue for four hours. Fifty-four people are arrested. Fire and vandalism damage leaves dozens of families homeless.
Tuesday, April 9: Wilmington's curfew is moved up to start at 7:30 p.m. Gatherings of 10 or more people are banned, as are firearms outside homes or businesses and sale of gasoline or other flammables in containers.
Burning, looting and shooting continue, with reports of sniper fire. Dense smoke rising from West Center City is visible for miles. National Guard troops -- said to number 3,500 -- are mobilized and arrive in the city. Schools, courts and government offices are closed for King memorial services.
Wednesday, April 10: Police and fire officials call for power to be shut off in the West Side after rioters continue to burn down homes and businesses.
Thursday, April 11: Power is restored but fires continue. The National Guard on city streets reportedly is cut to 1,000.
National Guard remains
Easter Sunday, April 14: All is quiet. Gov. Terry refuses Wilmington Mayor John E. Babiarz's request to remove troops from city streets for the holiday.
April 15: Many National Guard troops secretly are demobilized on orders of the governor, who bids guardsmen farewell at their bivouac behind P.S. du Pont High School in the old Ninth Ward.
Authorities start to phase out foot patrols of black neighborhoods, starting use of troops in Jeeps, dubbed "Rat Patrols" after a popular TV show. State police patrols continue.
Schools are ordered to remain closed until the end of spring break.
April 16: Arrests top 400, with 92 people remaining jailed.
Late April: Tension remains when schools reopen. Beatings, muggings and extortions against white students are reported at P.S. du Pont High School throughout spring.
April 23: Damages are estimated at $162,835, a figure later pushed up to nearly $750,000 based on insurance settlements.
May 1: City curfew is lifted.
May 2: Wilmington ends its state of emergency, but the governor insists on keeping the National Guard in the city despite the mayor's request that troops go.
May 14: Curfew is lifted in New Castle County.
June 30: Costs of the ongoing National Guard riot patrols in Wilmington are said to hit $213,000, but total costs of the Wilmington operation later are estimated to top $2 million.
September: Schools open, with beatings and other racially motivated incidents reported at Wilmington High and elsewhere. City schools start to see exodus of white students.
Terry, running for re-election to a second term as governor, is challenged by Republican Russell W. Peterson, who polled far behind Terry after the National Guard's mobilization but closed the gap to 8 or 9 percentage points of the incumbent by mid-summer.
Nov. 5: Delawareans elect Peterson in an upset. He renews his call for National Guard withdrawal from Wilmington, but Terry refuses.
Nov. 29: A statewide coalition of clergy issues a strongly worded statement criticizing Terry and calling for patrols' removal. Terry again refuses to remove the National Guard, by now the longest occupation of an American city in national history since the Civil War. He says the clergy demand is "next to revolution."
Jan. 20, 1969: Terry's last day in office, he still refuses to remove the National Guard.
Jan. 21, 1969: Peterson is sworn in as governor in an unprecedented midnight swearing-in. He appoints a new commander of the Delaware National Guard and, at 3 a.m., orders their withdrawal.
'Somebody threw a brick ... and all hell broke loose'
King's death was catalyst to riots, but turmoil was years in making
By ADAM TAYLOR
The News Journal (April 6, 2008)
WILMINGTON -- Hal Haskell remembers the dozens of young black men marching up North Market Street as if it were yesterday.
"They were walking in a phalanx," he said, recalling that Monday afternoon on April 8, 1968. "I got off the sidewalk and they walked by me, not saying a word. They looked angry and determined. You knew something was dead wrong, but that it hadn't happened yet, but it was about to."
Later that night, rioters were on the streets of Wilmington. More than 400 people would be arrested over the next several days. Dozens of families were left homeless from fires.
Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis four days earlier. Though the violence in Wilmington would subside within a week, a nine-and-a-half month occupation by the National Guard, which numbered 3,500 at times, would last until January 1969.
Guardsmen weren't put on the streets to keep the peace for that long anywhere else in the country, even though King's death sparked violence in cities from coast to coast. Wilmington's occupation remains the longest of a U.S. city since Reconstruction.
Haskell, who would soon become mayor of Wilmington, could have no idea that the marchers would have such an impact on his future, or that of the city. But his premonition that trouble was brewing was confirmed shortly thereafter by the sound of breaking glass. The young men who walked past him participated in a memorial service to King in Rodney Square. Soon after, stores on Market Street would be vandalized.
"Somebody threw a brick through a window and all hell broke loose," said Jea Street, then a 15-year-old Wilmington High School student who left school to attend the Rodney Square service. Street is now a New Castle County councilman.
Herman M. Holloway Jr. heard the glass break. In the four days between King's assassination and the start of the rioting, Holloway, then 23, traveled with a group of large black men known as the "Goon Squad." The group worked to quell violent disturbances from April 4 to April 12 by threats of force -- or the actual use of it.
When the windows broke, Holloway said, he knew then that not even the Goon Squad, which included a former military heavyweight boxing champ, a truck driver and a guy who used to move cars by picking up one end at a time, could stop the violence.
Holloway was on Market Street when the stores were being torn up. He said a police officer hit a man and knocked him out.
"To me, that's when the city exploded. The young guys took off running for the West Side."
Whites fled
Mostly white downtown workers headed for the suburbs. Some of the fleeing cars had their windows broken by bricks on Madison Street at Eighth and Ninth streets.
A couple whose car had stalled on Gov. Printz Boulevard near the Riverside projects were pelted with glass milk bottles and large Hawaiian Punch cans taken from Jack's, a white-owned market that had been looted. The couple finally got their car started and escaped, but were bleeding as they left.
"Everybody liked Jack, because he kept a book for customers and allowed them to pay him back a little at a time, but he had to lock up and get on out of there," Holloway said. "People were crazy furious over King being assassinated, and they were trying to hurt white folks any way they could. It was an ugly and frightening situation, totally out of hand, and there we couldn't do anything about it but get the hell out of there."
One of the stores that was broken into on North Market Street was Herman's sporting goods. Jackie Stigars, a member of the Blackie Blacks gang in West Center City, said he and others took the guns from the store and went back to their neighborhood, which was then known as "The Valley."
When night fell, West Center City started to burn. Smoke could be seen for miles as city firefighters dodged bullets while battling some of the blazes.
Richard V. Pryor was then a social worker with the Catholic Office of Inner-City Development, one of three agencies that oversaw a group called the Wilmington Youth Emergency Action Council, which at the time of the riots was trying to bring together rival Wilmington gangs in a non-confrontational way.
During the West Center City fires and looting, Pryor got a call from one of his street social workers saying snipers were firing bullets from the rooftops.
"He asked me what to do," Pryor said. "I didn't have a good answer. I just told him to lay low and don't try to be a hero."
Mayor James M. Baker, then a social worker dealing with gang members as well, was on the streets in West Center City during the week of rioting. He remembers having a distinct preference for bottles being thrown from the rooftops instead of bricks.
"If you looked up at the street lights as you walked, you could see a quick reflection off the bottles so you had time to duck," he said.
Anger builds up
Looking back, many don't view the riots as solely a reaction to King's assassination. His murder was the catalyst for a reaction to years of inequality.
Baker recalled civil unrest in 1967 in the city. West Side youths broke into stores and threw bricks and bottles at passing cars driven by whites.
No specific event triggered the action, Baker said. The youths were attempting to show solidarity with other young black people in larger cities who were in the same plight, which included living in poor housing and dealing with police brutality.
The Interstate 95 construction project literally divided the city around that time as well.
There was also anger about Project A, a federal urban renewal program that stopped getting funded midstream, which resulted in many black homeowners being relocated for renovation projects that were never completed.
"His [King's] death was more like the straw that broke the camel's back," Baker said.
Baker looks back on the riots as a time when the young men thought that any black man over 40 was an Uncle Tom.
"They didn't want to hear from their elders about patience," he said. "I told them that tearing down where they lived was suicidal. Their answer was, 'What good is it anyway? We don't own it.' They were willing to lose everything in the name of freedom. That's the way they saw it."
Herman "Scotty" Brown, a former gang leader who said he engaged in some of the violence in Riverside, described Martin Luther King Jr. and Baker then as "milquetoast."
"I wasn't a pacifist. We followed Malcolm X," Brown said. "I never understood why you would sing a song in response to having dogs and fire hoses sicked on you."
When King was killed, it marked the end of the young militants listening to their elders' calls to be patient as social change unfolded.
"Once they killed the milquetoast guy, all bets were off," Brown said.
But Baker said much of the violence wasn't sporadic. Stores were targeted if they were perceived as establishments that had taken advantage of poor black residents.
Baker said the four-day delay proves his point in that rocks and bottles were stored on rooftops near the stores during the days before the riots as plans were hatched.
But then fires spread to unintended targets and chaos ensued.
"For years, the rioters have been portrayed as ignorant and doing things helter-skelter," Baker said. "The point that was missed and continues to be missed, is they were very smart. They knew what they wanted to do and they knew why they were doing it."
Stigars, one of the admitted rioters who now works a security detail at the William "Hicks" Anderson Community Center, said Baker has it right.
"We viewed ourselves as freedom fighters, not criminals," he said.
Dwight Davis, a young member of the Blackie Blacks gang, said that West Center City was one of the most progressive communities in the city in 1968 and was "ripe for radical thought."
No communication
At times, it seemed like Gov. Charles L. Terry Jr. was the only person in Delaware who thought the National Guard was needed after the state of emergency was lifted about two weeks after the rioting ended.
Judge Leonard L. Williams said Terry was a downstater with no understanding of race relations between whites and blacks in New Castle County -- and no adviser capable of explaining it to him.
Terry was told that there was a continuing threat in Wilmington, that young black men were arming themselves and the city would erupt if the Guard left.
"None of it was true," Williams said. "When you have that kind of misunderstanding and no lines of communication with the people who can straighten it out, only chaos can result."
So the Guard stayed and race relations went from bad to worse.