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Recollections of Flames and Fury in North Lawndale, Ill., 1968

April 11, 2018

As a small child, Reggie Smith had a front-row seat on the evening of April 4, 1968, when parts of his neighborhood of North Lawndale in Chicago went up in flames.

That was the day, 50 years ago, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated while standing on a balcony at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support African American sanitation employees.

Riots occurred across the United States that evening, but the destruction and violence in North Lawndale had a special significance because that is where King had lived in 1966 as he started his national campaign for fair housing.

Last week, National Public Radio and other news outlets focused on the community in their coverage related to the 50th anniversary of King’s death. Many of the stories spoke of how the community has never really recovered from the riot, although organizations are hard at work there.

Reggie Smith, now director of the offices of Social Justice and Race Relations for the Christian Reformed Church in North America, recalls how he watched the flames rise from the second-floor porch of his home, which overlooked Roosevelt Road and Springfield Avenue.

“The fires danced on stores where my mother shopped for groceries and on the restaurants where my father bought us soul food. Most of the stores were owned by Jewish and African Americans alike,” said Smith.

“But the grief over King's assassination needed an immediate response. The responses I saw included people with shopping carts filled with groceries fading into the dark streets.”

He also saw National Guard vehicles “whizzing down [his] street trying to regain law and order. Lawndale's anger had been boiling since the end of World War II. The fires and looting were like temporary pain medicine people used after losing the last prophet black people had known since Ida B. Wells,” said Smith.

Wells was an African-American journalist and activist who had led an anti-lynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s. She died in Chicago in 1931.

Duane VanderBrug, pastor of Lawndale Christian Reformed Church at that time, recalled some of his own memories of events surrounding King’s death. He said the area had escaped having a riot take place in 1967, when a number of uprisings had taken place in Detroit and elsewhere.

But in 1968 it was different.

To keep Lawndale parishioners out of harm’s way, VanderBrug recalls having to hold the Sunday service after King’s death at another church. Then later that week, on the same day as King’s funeral, VanderBrug officiated at the funeral of a man who had been killed in combat in Vietnam.

After the service, he and his wife drove 90 minutes to the military post cemetery for the serviceman’s burial and talked about King, he said, and “of poverty and peace, [and] of having something for which to live that was worth dying for.”

These recollections come from an article that VanderBrug, now retired, wrote for the Reformed Journal.

In the aftermath of the riot in his neighborhood, said Smith, “the charcoaled, burnt grocery store was never replaced. The National Guard disappeared from my street. The promise of new development was only a mirage.

“The neighborhood of Lawndale after 1968 was left on its own. But the Black Panther Party helped with lunches and kids’ homework. Churches filled some of the needs of children with Christmas parties. My public school directly across the street had afterschool programs.”

On the 50th anniversary of King’s death, said Smith, he believes MLK's legacy in Lawndale remains incomplete.

“There are some bright spots. Lawndale CRC kept to her mission of excellent faith-based Christian education and witness. Yet the holes of poverty laced with racist policies are not eradicated. The hard-nosed politics of Chicago are embedded in the city's fabric. Young black males are still the targets of fear.”

Smith recently visited North Lawndale. His former home had been abandoned for several years. Before it was recently demolished, he went in and climbed the old stairway to the second-floor apartment where he had lived.

“It transported me back to 1968 as a small child watching history in the making. The two-bedroom apartment was my orientation to MLK's dream [showing] that the flames do not build leadership and better futures.”

The people who have endured and grown amid the aftermath of this tragedy, Smith reflected, are those “whose resilience and faith never allowed despair to have the last word. Ordinary people did not need King's physical presence to forge a better tomorrow; they only needed to pour their hopes into today's children. ‘Incomplete’ is my grateful burden to bear because Jesus has the final word.”