Fallsnewspress.com - Something Else: After 40 years, potential for urban unrest remains

by Eric Marotta, News Leader editor

I was 7 when the nation erupted in flames 40 years ago. It started the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. According to news accounts from the time, the riots engulfed more than 100 cities, and the destruction continued sporadically for more than a week.

My family was lucky. Our predominantly white town in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley didn't burn. I wasn't afraid. I was a kid. Mom and Dad kept me safe.

But on our black-and-white television, black people looted and there were smashed storefronts in far-off cities. I saw burning buildings and white police and soldiers marching in formation, aiming their rifles.

According to news reports, 12,000 soldiers were deployed in the nation's capital, where firefighters were under attack while trying to extinguish blazes. Dozens of people were killed, and sections of the nation's poorest neighborhoods were destroyed.

There had been riots aplenty during the 1960s. Though most of them were race-related, it was the Vietnam era, and anti-war demonstrators were blamed for riots such as the one outside the Democratic National Convention in August 1968.

But there was nothing like the flood of violence that swept the country after Dr. King was shot.

In the years since, civil unrest has continued. New York rioted during the blackout of 1977. A second Los Angeles riot -- called "The Rodney King Uprising" by some -- was in 1992.

Even Ohio is not immune. A riot broke out in Cincinnati in 2001 after a 19-year-old black man was shot by a white police officer, and there was a four-hour riot in Toledo in 2005, after a group of neo-Nazis was attacked by opposition groups.

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How can conditions today, which still seem ripe for racial strife to potentially spill out into violence, be allowed to exist?

Just like 40 years ago, our nation's big cities remain largely segregated, with those in the inner city facing lower standards of living, lower achieving schools, higher unemployment rates and fewer prospects for the future.

Take education as an example.

A report issued April 1 by the publishers of the journal Education Week shows a grave situation exists in our nation's largest urban school districts. The study states our neighbor to the north, Cleveland, was 48th out of 50 districts they compared, with a 34 percent likelihood of high school freshmen there graduating.

April 9 marks the fifth anniversary of the fall of Baghdad, when Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled on national television. What if instead of spending $500 billion on "nation building" overseas, we had spent the last five years attacking the poverty and crime in our own big cities, where more people are murdered each year than ever were killed in long-ago riots?

If history repeats itself, we have only ourselves to blame.

E-mail: emarotta@recordpub.com

Phone: 330-688-0088 ext. 3171