Remembering 1968: The Holy Week Uprising and the Riots a Nation Forgot

there's campus occupations or that are anti war protests. There is a Democratic National Convention that is expected to be extremely hot.

been completely forgotten right. You know, there's there's become this kind of like I don't know, state cult isn't quite the right word, but there's become this sort of like professional institutional history of nineteen sixty eight, where like all of these universities like proudly have banners from like nineteen

sixty eight protests. Everyone has been like, you know, incredibly willing to embrace the legacy of the anti war movements and the Captus occupations, and you know, like insofar as they tell people not to embrace things, it's this stuff about like you know, you hear this constant screaming about don't repeat the sixty eight convention. But there's one part of this story that has is just gone, has been

excised from the historical record. It is extremely clear that no one wants you to remember it whatsoever, and that is the Holy Week Uprising.

going on here is a wave of urban rebellion. And when I say urban here, I'm not just talking about you know, like Watts or Detroit or Chicago, like these like giant urban cities, which is which is how you know, insofar as anyone ever talks about writing in this period is about these large urban centers. No, they are right in Milwaukee. The most intense fighting that we're going to

talk about in this episode happens in York, Pennsylvania. In this period for about is about nineteen sixty three to roughly by nineteen seventy one seventy two was kind of over. There are a staggering number of urban uprisings. I'm going I'm going to read a quote from a book called the Great Uprising, which is about this sort of period. Between nineteen sixty three and nineteen seventy two, America experienced

over seven hundred and fifty urban revolts. Upwards of five hundred and twenty five cities were affected, including nearly every one with a black population over fifty thousand. The two largest wave of uprisings came during the summer of nineteen sixty seven entry in Holy Week in nineteen sixty eight,

following the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior. In these two years alone, one hundred and twenty five people were killed, nearly seven thousand were injured, approximately forty five thousand arrests were made, and property damage top one hundred and twenty seven million dollars or approximately nine hundred million and twenty seventeen dollars.

can we can continue. Yeah, Okay. So the way I perceive this is the process of decolonization begins like in the colonies, and it comes back to the metropol right, and we see like this physical decolonization in places like Algeria, right, and then the impact of witnessing that returns to the metropol along with the theories that like, if you want to say they declonize the mind, I think that that's

an acceptable way. And like this sort of struggle and even the esthetic, right, like the aesthetic of the Battle of algieas is present in some of these uprisings, like and then you can stretch it out to like, you know, I like to talk about Winded NYE, but the second occupation of Winded Nee in nineteen seventy three, I think you could also see that as part of this decolonization struggle. At least that's my uh, yeah, that's my angle on it.

Civil rights movement, which isn't what happens. Yeah, And the other way I think this is seen and this is I don't know, a lens that is kind of useful to talk about this, but kind of isn't is about the sort of quote unquote long nineteen sixty eight, So you know, we're gonna be covering a lot of nineteen sixty eight stuff on this show, you know, so like

there's obviously this nineteen sixty eight in France. I think if you want to look at the origin point of the sort of like wave uprisings that are specifically nineteen sixty eight and that aren't sort of like the decolonization arc, I think it probably starts in China with the January

Storm in nineteen sixty seven. But on the other hand, sort of and this is you know, one of the things about this period is everything is happening so much at the same time, right, Like we have a lot of experience about this, but like you know, as the January Storm, the January Storm is as part of the Culture Revolution where Mao kind of loses control and Mao kind of incites a bunch of these like a bunch

of workers in Shanghai to like take the city. But then they actually take the city and they run the party out, they run the pla out, and for a brief period of time, Shanghai like has just been taken by its working class and is not being run by the party, and there's this whole, like you know, massive

series of struggles and kind of struggles. But the thing that the think about the sort of the way succeed is understood is you know, even some people even include that, but these riots, specifically the Holy Week riots are almost never talked about as as part of this process, which I think they obviously are, and I think, you know, part of the reason that we're talking about them now

is that you can't understand the Columbia campus occupations. You can't understand the kind of politics that's going to come after that, you can't understand the and see, you can't understand like the rise of black radicalism. Like none of this is comprehensible at all unless you understand these riots, because this was the uprising that sort of kicked everything off.

It's also this is a very hard thing to write about because like this, I've had the time of my life trying to put this together because this thing should be like thirty five hours, and I don't have thirty five hours. I have thirty minutes. So that being said, let's get into why these are happening. So obviously there is the civil rights movement happening. You know, nineteen sixty five you get, you get the Voting Rights Act. We've

had some civil rights acts. But comma, if you are like you are a part of the black working class in nineteen cities of America, a society is still unbelievably racist. Like they're like, you know, like on on a very basic level, there's a bunch of people walking around calling you the N word. You are restricted to the shittiest jobs available, assuming you can find work at all. One

of the biggest ones. And this is something that this is something that was a very big focus of the kind of later civil rights umit that kind of has been a race for historical memory was struggle over housing. I'm going to read another thing from the Great Uprising SNCC field worker John Baptiste, who took over for Robinson and Hanson, described many of the homes in the Second War. This is in Cambridge, which is one of the places

where those really intense rioting. Both we'll talk about this in a little bit, but both in sixty three and in sixty seven describe many of the homes in the Second Ward as nothing more than converted horse barns, corn cribs, and company shacks, which lacked hot, running water, flush toilets, and electricity. Separate and independent investigations by federal officials confirmed

Betista's claims. We were shown block after block of tottering, single family frame structures, often lined along dirt roads and generally with little or no setback, which is like they're like directly on the street, right, you open your door and you're on the street, crowded almost against each other, and on small lots, sometimes of no more than fifty or sixty foot depth, reported one US Department of Housing and Urban Development official. These dwellings were obviously obsolete and

in disrepair, with tumbling porches and steps. Many were without inside toilets, and in several instances, the outside privy served more than one family. Hot water is rarely available, and several are without inside water. Overcrowding is a common pattern. So you know, this is the kind of like this,

this is one of the centers of these struggles. So these people are living in like nineteen thirties barns and this, you know, there is there was a sort of staggering amount of anger about this, and the other aspect of this is that you know, okay, so these people are

living in like places that are not fit human habitation. Also, they are on average fifty six percent more of their income goes to rent than white than Why then white people paid a rent, which means that you know, and and this this is also one of the things that's happening in this period is that there's a bunch of money for like white people that the government is giving them, are giving people sort of loans and subsidies and tax credits to go buy houses. None of this is happening

for black people. So what you have is a situation where like if you are black, basically all of your money is being absorbed into rents. There is no possibility of you like saving or you know, like saving to buy a house, like other than the sort of like ramshackle shit that you're in, Like the conventional civil rights movement, right you're sort of like non violent marches. This hasn't

done shit to deal with any of these problems. You're also dealing with really really intense labor discrimination, you know, and I mean these are things like like there's this kind of like example in Baltimore where you know, you'll you'll you'll have union locals that are literally all white locals, right, and they will they will cut these deals with management where they will be like, well, management will hands like hiring and firing power over to the unions, and the

unions go, oh great, okay, and this this is a negotiated thing between the two. The unions are like, okay, only unions can work at only union members can work at the shop, which in theory is good. But in practice what this means is because these are all white unions, right, they've they've now created a system by which you can, by which you can just not hire black people.

People are making people are doing these like you know, like white progressors are giving these speeches about how like, ah, segregation is like ending where we're like integrating quickly, and it's not happening, and all of this kind of you know, all of this sort of fuel and also and obviously the sort of immediate spark of a lot of a lot of these uprisings, So particularly in sixty seven, is that as as happens today, you know, you all statistically

have lived I don't know why I was satistically, all of you have.

of the riots in this period. We're not going to talk about Detroit either, even though that was another really big one, because you know, you you can go out and you can find a bunch of people kind of talking about these. We are going to start in Omaha. Where begin Yeah, Like but again, this this is something that's very important is that this is not just a sort of uprising of the urban ghettos, which is which

is how it's like very explicit. This is literally the language that is used at this time to describe what's happening here. But like, no, this is happening in a bund Like again, Cincinnati and Omaha is interesting because it has one of the a very very common one of the other big sort of rallying points in this era is price gouging. So you know, if you're if you're in one of these like ninety nine percent black communities, like the one, like the one white person who is

there is the shop owner. And the thing the shop owner is doing is the shop owner is gouging you for food because you don't you know, you don't have any other options to buy for you from, so they're going to gouge you, and they're going to give you like the worst products you can ever you've ever seen in your life. And so by many sixty six people

are just fed up with this. There start there start to be sort of protests, like specifically at these white stores, there's a bunch of people, you know, throwing rocks.

stone wall, you know. One of the big things in this period too, and this is something that like like you know, this is what MLK and the Poor People's Campaign was sort of working on at the same time, was you know, these these these demands for job programs, and so people are you know, marching round, they doing like pickets. Omaha, Like has a Malcolm X come speak at one point and he's talking about like, you know, like the youth these protests and people like marching outside

of Safeway saying like we want jobs. And these protests start getting attacked by the police, and this is something that you know, this is something that that has been happening to these nonviolent sit ins. I'm going to read a passage from the book. Then the burnings began from there, Omaha police Wallace's quote unquote goon squad and spectators began to beat the protesters out of the auditorium using batons and metal folding chairs. Reeling from the attacks, African American

youth retaliated in the streets. So like like they'll be in meetings with community with like like the mayor or whatever, and these fucking mobs will start just beating people with chairs. The goon squad, you say, yeah, God reminds me of the we've been running ads to free down at Peltier a week.

kid with a riot gun. And this, you know, this sets off like as sort of you know the patterns that Worshire visa seeing of like these sort of escalating riots. And this is a very kind of familiar riot, right, Like I think we've all we've all had the like, Okay, so the police attacked a bunch of people, so it caused.

is nowhere near as powerful as it is now. People will just fucking shoot. And one of the constant things you read about when you're reading about these riots is that is, you know, every police account has police like screaming about snipers, and like I didn't believe this, right, because I was reading this, I was like, Okay, whatever other police, right, they talk about snipers all the time.

You see this in radical accounts too, where people will talk about like, well, yeah, like the National Guard and Watts will be talking about how they're taking sniper fires so they'll start shooting machine guns and like the rus of build at buildings.

what's this actually happening? And then the next thing I read was an interview with a guy who'd been a black nationalist and starts talking about how they they were using all of their dynamite stores and how they didn't have fuses for the dynamites so they had to like they had to plant the dynamite and then retreat across the sheet to shoot at the dynamite.

and that's just not true. A lot of the civil rights movement, like things that people now think of as like non violent campaigns, weren't like a lot of the stuff in uh oh my fucking Like a lot of a lot of the fights in Louisiana like are just straight up riots.

you know, getting back to like nineteen sixty three. Like the civil rights stuff that she's doing is extremely effective and a lot of it is just straight up riots, to the point where like there's a very famous thing for the civil rights era are called the Treaty of Cambridge, where like she and her people agreed to like stop rioting and the city agreed to completely integrate. But by the time he gets to nineteen sixty seven, they haven't done it. And so the riots started off in Cambridge again.

And you have this incredibly sort of hot like summer. Over the course of ninety sixty seven, there's this like enormous wave of riots and you know, a Cambridge's famous one, but like Detroit's another big one. And this, I don't know, this should have given people warning that there there would be, you know, giant uprisings if anyone did anything to MLKA,

but apparently it didn't. And you know, I, you know what else I won't I don't know, set off have already used the you know what else won't set off massive waves of uprisings pivot. I really didn't prepare good enough pivots for this.

But what did happen is that you know, he was he was killed by white people. And this this detonates a fucking nuclear weapon in the US, you know, reading accounts, to me, it reminds me of the first week of the George Floyd uprisings in twenty two And I want people remember this. There's this picture of this guy in Philly with an Almo like we wearing like an Elmo like head, and he has his fist rays and he's standing in front of a bunch of things of fire

like this. This is what this is what that looks like. I'm going to read a quote from one of the people who was people who was there. I mean I was sad when I first heard the news of King's death, but not but not like the world around me. The city was burning and I'm walking through the city and the city is burning, and that's what we wanted.

kind of getting cynical about by by sixty eight. But the fact that they killed him, it it is, it is a kind of psychological blow that I don't think we've ever experienced. Like maybe maybe if you took like, if you took like Trump's election, like at the same time as a twenty twenty uprising, that like maybe maybe kind of captures what people are feeling in this moment. And I want to read another account. I want to read an account that's it's it's it's sort of secondhand

account by this priest. It's like a Catholic priest in a largely black area. This is from the Great Uprising. Yet other observers saw the uprising as a clear protest against the persistence of racial inequality. Father Richard Lawrence, an activist priest whose Catholic parish served many blacks, recalled encountering one of his parishioners on the street after the revolt

had begun. Father, you don't understand. I know you've been with the demonstrations and all that sort of thing, the parishioner explained to Lawrence, But you were born white and you can't really totally understand. I mean, I've done the civil rights thing too, you know it. I've been there. I've been to the marches, I've been to the rallies, you name it. Nobody's listening. His parishioner continued, murdering doctor

King was just the last straw that nobody's listening. We can go on demonstrating as long as we want, no one will listen. I don't know what to try next, but maybe blood flowing in the streets is what it takes. Maybe some of his blood with some of my blood flows in the streets, then maybe the man will listen. Maybe not, but I've got nothing left to try. I don't care if I got killed. I've got two kids and I'm not going to have them come up in the world. I came up up and I'm just not

going to have it. And this is I think a really important part of these riots is that these are people who had fought, who had fought for a decade over it. I mean, there's this point, it's about a

decade and a half of struggle. They've done everything. They've done strikes, they've done boycotts, they've done sit ins, they've voted, they got the right to vote, right, they march, they did civil disobedience, and you know the product of this is that they're living in a dilapidated house with a shitty job, and then they fucking killed MLK and the country burns. The National Guard straight up is there are there are there are like there are just straight up

military occupations in an enormous number of cities. DC is occupied by like the five hundred and third Military Police Battalion, the National Guard, and famously the eighty second Airborne. So like the regular US army is being sent into to like to like is being sent into these cities. The level of sort of burning here too. And this is the thing that's I think kind of the most famous part of these riots is they burn staggering parts of cities.

There are I mean, just like unbelievable numbers of buildings are burned, and people people sort of people, people go out to fight. People are people are shooting at the police, the police are shooting back at them. I mean, there's I wasn't to find the footage one of my friends was telling me about, like there's there's footage from newspeople in New York. I like a guy shooting out side of a window, and they have footage of like a

police like swat team. Basically I think it's like still pre swap, like a police like team coming in just killing him. And you know, I mean Richard M. Daley famously that has a who's the mayor of Chicago, has a shoot to kill order. You know, his his words are, quote shoot to kill any arsonists or anyone with a Molotov cocktail, and quote shoot to cripple or maim anyone looting any stores in our city. Jesus, It's really fucking bad.

And you know, this is something that's that's about about these these riots, right Like, Okay, if if you look at even the Watch riot, or if you look at twenty twenty, if you look at like twenty fourteen, like the Baltimore uprising in twenty fifteen, there are like people having a good time. Like this is always the thing in riots. There's always like someone who's like having a

great time. Fucking no one. I read like dozens and and dozens of interviews of people from people from the Holy Week up pressing every single person involved in this

is having the absolute worst time of their lives. That's like on every single side, right that everyone is fucking miserable, and you know, but but part part of what's happening here too is these are these these uprisings are also about Vietnam because you know, a lot of these people either have been sent to Vietnam or like their families

have been sent to Vietnam. Black people are dying at an unbelievable rate in Vietnam, and these people come back and they're like, well, we're gonna fucking die anyway, So I rather die. I'd rather go out fighting the cops than, you know, than than dying in Vietnam. And also, you know what I've been talking a lot about kind of like the stipers in the windows, but one of the most common ways people get killed, well, okay, probably the most common ways they get trapped into burning building, which

is terrible. But one of the other really common ways is that these are these are gun fights. You know,

we kind of saw this in twenty twenty. There's a bunch there are like white store owners are like popping out of their businesses to take pot shots at a protesters, and like they're they're you know, one of the people that they interviewed was a guy who had been like walking past a store and the guy had pulled out a gun and shot him, and he had he had managed shop, but the guy next to him got shopped, so if he took out a molotov and like burned

the store down. And this is a lot of the kind of dynamics of this, right are, Like it's not just that people are furious. It's not just the people sort of you know, like people want this world to burn.

It's that like they are very directly responding to the fact that the like white people also fucking lose their minds when this starts happening, and you you get this degree of sort of of urban conflict that kind of you know, we don't really have this now, no, he yeah, Like like even even our riots are like largely nonviolent, like people don't shoot it out with the cops or each other in the same way that like, you know, like like it happens sometimes like this is happening fucking

all over the country. Like this is happening in like like like you know, like like fucking small ass cities in the Midwest. There are people getting in gunfights, right, you know, And so eventually.

fucking were a bunch of people. And this was a really smart decision by the National Guard people because if they had started actually shooting into these crowds like this wouldn't have been one week of really intense rioting that ends with the civil rights sack, which we'll talk about, well, it doesn't end with the civil right sack, but like, you know, it could have sort of gets that this would have been like apocalyptic on a scale that I

don't think anyone kind of like has the capacity to imagine. But instead they kind of, you know, there's really intense riots, they kind of they kind of wind.

this is a very very weird piece of legislation. I mean, it's obviously this is something that's been like frantically like scrambled out because like this, you know, the like there are just straight up armed uprisings in a huge portion of the United States, and Congress's responses, so they passed the Fair Housing Act. That's like that's probably the most famous part of this bill.

is like straight up a conspiracy theory. Right, So it's a conspiracy theory about what happened in the nineteen sixty seven uprising in Cambridge. So like that that uprising, Like that's the thing that produced Spireau Agnew, who was like Nixon's deranged VP, who Nixon picked to be so deranged that no one would assassinate him becausessassinating him will put spuiau Agnue in charge, like Agnew had been like a limp,

like he'd been a liberal Republican. But then there were these riots in Cambridge sixty eight in sixty seven, and the narrative that comes out of it is what happened was a black power leader named h. H Rat Brown came in and gave a speech and then there was like riots, right, and this is this is the standard line for like seventy years. What actually happened was that he gave you know, Rap gives it Rep Brown age.

Rep Brown gives a very militant speech, right, Like he does give a speech telling people to burn a school down, like he's saying you need to like five people. But then everyone just goes home, as h Rap Brown is is, you know, they're like dispersing this young woman asked to be escort at home just and get beat up by the police, and so Hrap Brown thirty people are like okay, and so they try to go home and the police walk up to them and start shooting them with shotguns.

used against. But before wanting to do that, I need to make it clear that these riots don't end in sixty eight, right, And in fact, I think the one that is the most intensive these is York in New York or Pennsylvania, which I promise you the beginning of this episode we were going to do, and that is in nineteen sixty nine. Because again, like the conditions that

cause these erb and uprisings like haven't changed. So you know, like the the immediate flames of sort of like of the Holy Week uprising, like of this rebellion by MLK sort of you know eventually trickle out, but there's just more of them.

street gang like walked up and shot them both. And this kicks off a series of shootings, brickings, and fistfights between black and white people like all over the city. And this is a kind of this is also the other kind of right in this period, and like we don't really have this anymore like there, but you know there are places where just effectively straight up race wars start. Well, you know one of the things happens here, This happens

in a lot of cities. They'll just be like a bunch of white people in a van driving around shooting at people out their windows, and we sort you know, the like this happened in Portland, right, but it was like they were shooting paintballs. These guys are just shooting actual guns, like out their windows any black people they

see on the street. Right, There's there's a crowd of like eventually like protest start like this, this crowd of like pretty well armed black people and this, uh and and and like a line of cops are facing each other, and you know this is one of these There's two sides to the story. The cops claim that the crowd just started shooting at them, Like everyone in the crowd claims that the cops shot at them first and they started shooting back. And so there's just this fucking shootout

between the cops and this this giant crowd. There are like there are reports of cops like just set up on the rooftop of a factory just shooting everyone they can find, like white gangs or firebombing black houses. One of the I don't know, like and it's that like should be infamous, but like I've never fucking seen talked

about anywhere is a fucking police armored truck. There's a bunch people who have come out to their lawn to figure out what the fuck is going on, and the police armored truck rolls up and just start shooting them, and so, you know, people and people start shooting back, and there's a bunch.

this town. And you know, like York is a place that has had civil rights stupment stuff before this, it's also has you know again like it has just literal white power, like street gangs who the police are in. I mean, the police literally just call them the boys like that. That's how, that's how, that's how tight these people are.

to become black power leaders and people influenced by these movements like doing arm self defense. And that is true and that is important, but also just regular ass people are also doing this, right, Like the guys, the twenty guys who are having a shootout with the police armored vehicle, they are just like some of them are Vietnam vets, but like they're just they're they're just regular people who saw the police fucking roll up like into like roll

up on a fucking house and start shooting people. There is a sense in you know, in this period that the thing that guns are for are to protect you from the government, right, and people actually believe this, like JFK, you know, want to There's a really good article in Strange Matters called The Double Kind of Resergency that's about this, that talks about how JFK literally gives a speech where he talks about, like again, who is a liberal gives a speech about how like, yeah, we need guns to

defend itself against the tiarity of the government, and yeah, like, if you are a black person in York in nineteen sixty nine and you are watching the police from an armored vehicle shooting people on their front lawn, the response people had was, Okay, we're gonna die here or we're gonna die in Vietnam, And so I'm gonna I am choosing to die here fighting the cops. And that's I

think that's important. I think because a lot of you know, a lot of what we're going to talk about next right, are these student radicals And everyone now looks at these student radicals and goes, these people were insane. These people were stupid. These people didn't understand what was happening. There was no way a revolution was ever.

win because they have machine guns and stuff. But people did it still right there, there are still numbers of this that they are watching. They're watching armed up risings in basically every every major in mind, not even major, every like minor American city has one of these. And these people assume that this is the revolution and that you know, like that this is this is the opening stage of the revolution, that it's coming, and they weren't.

They weren't wrong to think that, like it didn't happen. But it's not that these people, like, you know, it's not that these people were sort of naive or foolish. It was they had the same rational reaction to what they were seeing that the f behind the Knickson administration did. And I think that's the place I'm going to close. So I think the next one of these episodes is going to be about the Columbia student occupations. But the one after that, well I might do basical standing there.

But we are eventually going to get to the DNC all part. And I promised you the a thing about the people who are charged under the Riot Act. Yeah, So the people who are going to the most videos, people who are going to be charged with this like interstate riot shit are the Chicago seven seven people arrested at the Democratic National Convention. So when we come back in however long it takes to do the rest of the ninety six d A.