Riots over Martin Luther King Jr.'s death impacted Joliet

JOLIET – The city of Joliet was wracked with anger in April 1968.

Buildings were on fire, windows of businesses were broken, and dozens of people – mostly youths – were arrested and charged with vandalism and looting.

After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, Joliet, along with many cities nationwide, was the site of civil unrest over the death of a leader who advocated nonviolently for civil rights.

Several black leaders in Joliet who were alive at the time say there are some parallels between racial tensions then and now, as the past two years the nation have seen more activism and renewed concern over discrimination and police violence.

Some have said although progress has been made, there still are challenges to overcome.

Will County Board Democratic Caucus Chairman Herbert Brooks, D-Joliet, who was a teen at the time, said the riots in 1968 were unheard of in a then-mostly rural area like Joliet.

“I think it really kind of shaped this city of Joliet. Even though it took some rioting and some horrible, ugly things, I think some good came out of it,” Brooks said.

Riots in Joliet

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the pillars of the U.S., said Raymond Bolden, a former Will County judge and president of the Joliet branch for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The response to the civil rights movement, especially in the South, was hostile.

Bolden said if people want justice and freedom, they have to fight for it because it won’t be automatic.

“[King] was just one of many black leaders who had to give up their lives to prove it,” he said.

After King’s assassination, riots broke out over his death in major cities across the U.S., including Chicago, where Joliet National Guardsman were sent to control civil disturbances. However, they were eventually needed back home during the chaotic weekend.

The earliest signs of riots in Joliet were April 5, according to The Herald-News archives.

The following night, city officials enforced a weeklong curfew after a “siege of arson, looting and vandalism that swept from the South Side to the downtown area.” City, county and state police, and National Guardsmen from Danville, were called to quell disturbances.

A Joliet warehouse and a downtown food mart were destroyed by fires. Dozens of people were arrested and charged for curfew violations, arson, vandalism and looting.

In one case, National Guardsmen and state police circled the Joliet Municipal Building when a group of 200 black youths threatened to march on it to protest the arrest of a black teen charged with arson and burglary.

Bolden – who was the Joliet NAACP president at the time – said his role was to make sure the law prevailed, as he didn’t want anyone to get hurt or the police to use the riots as an excuse to kill people.

“We were trying to calm people down and try to help people control their emotions because they had a good reason to be angry. They had a good reason to want to do something. The trouble was, they were doing things that were contrary to their own best interests, and that’s what we were struggling against,” he said.

Warren Dorris, Prayer Tower Ministries pastor and former city councilman, said he thought the riots were a discredit to King, as his platform was nonviolence. Dorris was an eighth-grader at Gompers Junior High School at the time.

“The thing that I still don’t understand is why they tried to destroy their own neighborhood,” he said.

Brooks said witnessing the riots as a young man was amazing. He said looking back, the destruction was not something to be proud of, but the fight for civil rights at the time motivated him to become an activist.

“Once those things occurred, I did not want to go back to life as usual,” he said.

Change happens slowly

Some city officials had negotiations with black youth groups that were unsuccessful after the riots.

However, in the aftermath, a group was formed demanding, among many things, better job opportunities and housing for the black community and the teaching of black history in schools. The group created a new avenue for resolving discrimination and improving black lives.

Since 2014, there has been renewed national attention over discrimination toward black people, particularly in relation to police violence. Major protests have followed the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; Eric Garner in New York; Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Ohio; and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland.

The excessive response from the Ferguson Police Department to the protests over Brown’s death in particular drew criticism internationally.

Late last year, protests occurred after the release of a video showing the shooting death of Laquan McDonald in Chicago.

Dorris said Joliet is calmer now than it was in 1968 and the response to injustices are more peaceful; but he said if a resolution is not reached on police violence, it will “come to a boiling point.”

After King’s death, there was a “real aggression toward bringing about change,” he said.

Bolden said the U.S. has been living and still lives a life of “words but not action.” Today black people are being killed by police and grand juries won’t indict them, he said.

For Bolden, change happens slowly, and sustained learning and growth are the result of the work of generations not the events of a few days.

“It evolves slowly,” he said.